


Reach Out And Touch Faith

by d__T



Series: put me to the test [5]
Category: Falling Skies
Genre: Combat, F/M, Internalized Homophobia, Occasional use of slurs, Politics, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, canon rewrite (season 5 only), character death is canon compliant (except for one), farming, how do you start over after the end of the world?, idiots learning how to love, in this house we disrespect tom mason, injuries, plot critical alternative energy sources, sara and john are bi, sexual activity, walking takes a long time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-02-25 14:34:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 24
Words: 63,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22457761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d__T/pseuds/d__T
Summary: John Pope wakes up as if from a terrible nightmare with a new resolve to get his shit together. Winning the war that's defined his life for the last three years gets all tangled up with that.Or: Are you mad about canon fridging Sara? Good, me too, here's how things might have turned out if she hadn't died.
Relationships: John Pope/Sara
Series: put me to the test [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1128731
Comments: 10
Kudos: 5





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is a complete season 5 rewrite. Most of the events, plots, characters, and nonsense occur in canon and I am wrapping a different narrative and structure around them in an attempt to create a story that doesn't leave everyone screaming in frustration. While this is fanfiction, I have attempted to make this a stand alone story- you don't need the other stories in this series (except for the prologue in I'll Make You A Believer) and you may not even need canon (although the reader experience may be enhanced by already knowing what everyone looks like).
> 
> Reading note: I will put a § at the beginning and end of each section that has smut in it so you can skip over that if you like.

John bursts into consciousness. Not asleep to wakefulness; it feels like he was dead and resuscitated with an epipen to the heart and the needle’s broken off inside him. He’s panting, great heaving gasps, body shaking. All around him is greenery; forest under-story, moss and vines and shrubs and the skree of birds and summer frogs, and the unmistakable but dissipating stench of rot and death from the other world.

He’d made it. He’d made it home.

Thank  _fuck_ . Thank god. He made it. He picks himself up out of the fallen leaves. There's a little divot where he'd fallen; he'd landed hard, wherever he'd fallen from.

The last things that he remembers are the antiseptic puke-green tile walls of a hospital and the calmly, patiently, beatifically sadistic woman-robot with the synthetic green eyes leaning over him, saying, “I need some samples-”

He hastily pats himself down, brushing off the leaves that he’d fallen in as he goes. Nothing seems wrong and the pain in his chest is receding although his hands come away from his chest with the tacky feeling of drying blood. He can’t see what’s wrong and his hand isn’t wet.

He’d use his knife as a mirror but it’s gone and so is his pistol and jacket. Whatever it is doesn’t seem to be actively bleeding, so he’s probably gonna be fine.

He’s gotta find Sara.

He’s gotta apologize. He has been given a second chance and he can’t squander it.

He also falls when he tries to stand. But, he sees a bundle lying a little ways from him so he scoots over to investigate.

It’s actually two bundles. One is his own heavily worn black leather jacket. He puts it on and immediately feels better despite the heat and humidity in the forest. The other is also a black leather jacket but it’s not his. Inside is his revolver- sans holster but with moon clips- and three knives. The buck knife in a brown leather sheath is his- he clips it onto his belt where it belongs. The remaining knives are very different; one is a graceful throwing knife with a carved bone handle, and the other has the blocky black tactical look of a trendy blade and the wear to show it’s anything but.

He doesn’t even want to touch them; he knows what they’ve done and where they’ve been and that the bone is human and who it belongs to and he wishes that he didn’t know any of those things. But he’s not exactly in a position to turn down free knives so he rolls them back up in the jacket and sets off to get his bearings, or at least some water to try to get the dead meat stench of the other world out of his hair and clothing.


	2. Chapter 1

John Pope approaches the farmhouse cautiously. Last time Sara had shot at him just because; now she has a reason.

Well, he'd been coming to steal resources and she'd defended herself. This time it's personal.

The footprints and scorch marks from the mech are still marring the yard, reminding him that it’s only been a few weeks since this all started. Flowers and grasses are growing up through the scars but it's hard to find it beautiful; the reminder of it is threat enough to put him further on edge.

A wooden creak catches his ear, then another. He peers around the corner of the house. Sara is on the porch, pacing, rifle tucked idly under her left arm. She doesn’t seem to be wearing the splint on her right arm anymore. Good. God, he'd missed her. God, she’s beautiful.

The defensive urge to take the upper hand and force himself into control of the situation rises in him like bile.

He swallows it down, a burn at the back of his throat fighting to get out, and backs away. He changes his trajectory to take him in a broad arc through the yard that unavoidably puts him in front of the porch.

No cover. An easy target. It’s all in her hands, his life tucked under her arm.

“John!” Sara hails him, empty hand raised and surprise on her face. “I heard you was dead. What the hell hell happened?”

“Long story! Can I- may I come in?” He approaches cautiously.

She keeps him in her sight as she waves him into the farmhouse.

The farmhouse hasn’t changed much. Sara must have slotted right back into her old life when she left the colony. Something about that hurts and he wants to lean on the counter. Stay mobile, stay defensive. But he’s learned a goddamn thing about staging a scene in the last couple of weeks, run a thousand variations of this meeting in his mind as he ran from all the living nightmares of Julian's world.

The chair he’d woken up on, drugged and disoriented all those days ago is still at the kitchen table. He sits there; let us begin again.

She gives him the smallest flicker of a smile. He counts it as a victory until she demands, “So what gives? How aren't you dead? Why’d you come find me?”

All of his carefully laid plans escape his mind instantly. He’s a fool, and flying blind.

“I- I’m sorry.” John makes himself look up at her. He means this. “I’m sorry.”

“Okay.” It’s not acceptance. But she is listening.

He forges onward. “I got so fucking scared that. I’d lose you too. I had-”

He stops, shaking his head slightly. His long hair gets in his face and he brushes it back behind his ears. A long time ago, a lawyer had told him a couple of things. One was to stop making excuses for his actions and own them and the other, right before they went into court, was ‘get your fucking hair out of your fucking face’. Both bits of advice had served him well since then. “I panicked. I’m sorry for hurting you.”

She dips her head slightly. “It’s been two weeks thinking you're dead.”

“Um.” He says. It’s been busy and he doesn’t know how to apologize for _that_. He hadn’t even really considered that they’d think he was dead because he was very much fighting for his life the whole time. “I volunteered for one of Mason’s suicide missions, got teleported to another world, and- Jesus, I still have to tell Tom his daughter's dead.”

She’d flinched when he said suicide mission, and  _how_ does he explain Julian Fucking Slink.

“What the fuck happened.” The harsh tone is back in her voice.

He has to pick one right now to explain; Julian or Lexi. Julian is the one eating him alive from the inside. It’s the one that hurts her. “I-. Back in Boston. I didn’t tell you everything that happened.” Sara clicks her fingernails on the counter and he struggles onward. “Please don’t-.”

She’s leaning against the counter in the exact place he would be if he was the one standing instead. “Jesus Christ, what did you do.”

He looks at her knees, her boots, his own hands knotted up in his lap. “A man fell through a portal from a different world and I-” couldn’t drive him out “-He seduced me.”

He leaves it at that, praying that she’ll extrapolate and not at the same time as he looks up at her. Sara places the rifle on the counter with a clatter and scrubs her hands over her face. “Okay. Christ, okay. How does that connect to- Mason’s suicide mission.”

“I thought I died after the moon mission but I woke up in his world.” Sara looks at him sharply. “It was-” John shivers. He understands now why he couldn’t drive Julian away with fear or violence. “A nightmare. I came back as quickly as I could. Here to you.”

He trails off. “I’m sorry. I’d like- to try again. If you want.”

Sara leans on the counter and looks at him. He doesn’t want to hope, doesn’t want to breath; if he speaks, he’ll beg.

Time stretches, warping and suffocating.

He slides off the chair to kneel at her feet.

“Yeah, I missed you too.” Sara says quietly. “Welcome back.”

He exhales, pressing his face to her knees and trying not to cry.

They stayed there like that for a long time, each thinking their own thoughts as the light grew long and the tear spots he left on the knees of her jeans slowly dried. And then Sara moves to tousle his hair. "Damn, you stink. What'd you do, roll in a ditch?" 

He had, several times, desperately trying to get the stink of death and carnage and blood off of him and out of his hair and clothes. Every cleanish trickle of water he came across, near as damnit. He'd found a house and stolen the soap and shampoo, and cleaned his wounds but he still feels dirty. Crusted over in horror like it’s gotten in under his skin.

Sara takes his lack of denial as the affirmative. "This place has a cistern on the roof. Liquid hell from the sun but clean; I'll show you how it works."

"Yeah, thanks." He'd spent too long on the floor and has to use the counter to haul himself to his feet. "Augh."

Sara snorts and slaps his shoulder. "C'mon."

The water from the cistern is, as promised, disgustingly warm. It’s not quite hot enough to strip the grimy feeling out of his skin but it’s so much more effective than trying to boil his shirt clean and then using it to scrub himself down with. Being able to sluice water through his hair is just what he needed to reset from the hour to hour survival mentality.

But after he’s dried off, his clothes are still dirty and on the floor and he hasn’t got anything other than the towel in his hand. Everything he had before is with the colony; here he has the clothes he showed up in and his weapons.

He wanders out into the house with the towel around his hips like he lives there but feeling acutely that he does not. He finds Sara in the living room with a book angled into the last of the sunlight and a candle. Like it's home and this is normal, and he aches with longing for that possibility.

She looks him up and down and smirks, appreciation clear in her gaze. "Come to apologize some more?"

He'd been hoping for clothing that even approximately fits him and he almost says so, tired and addled, before he realizes that she's messing with him. Like before.

"Tell me how you would like your apologies?"

She puts the book aside and uncrosses her legs. The easy spread of her knees draws his gaze up the worn pale seams of her jeans, and then she pats a thigh. "Come here."

He approaches carefully to kneel between her feet. She presses his head until he lays his face on her leg and relaxes bit by bit.

"Like this." Sara says quietly, stroking his hair. It's not quite as nice as it could be- his hair is still damp- but that's not what matters. "Just be."

He is, until his joints ache and the sustained posture makes him shiver. Still, he doesn't want to break the quiet. "I need to get dressed."

"You're not putting those dirty clothes back on."

He nods against her leg. "Anything in this place that might fit me?"

Sara thinks about it for a moment. "I think there might be a coupla shirts upstairs."

John groans. "Tell me I can do laundry here."

"Of course." She yawns. "Put them in to soak and deal with it tomorrow. Go on."

He slowly gets to his feet and follows her instructions on where the wash bucket is and where to leave it while she brushes her teeth and then they're at the impasse of where he's sleeping and she says, "You can sleep with me but don't go poking me with your dick in the night."

The relief flows through him so quickly and strongly, he hadn't realized he was trying to not hope for that.

And then they sleep.


	3. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Good morning!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter has smut in it, section bounded by §.  
> warnings: John has some flahbacks featuring violence, but the flashbacks aren't graphic and he comes back quickly from them.

The morning is cool and full of pale slanted light and his legs are tangled in hers and it’s so damn peaceful that something in him wakes up afraid and angry.

The horror of the last two weeks- he places a kiss on her bare shoulder and rolls himself out of the bed. He’s gotta piss, he’s gotta beat his clothes with a stick and soap until the smell of death falls out of them, he ought to make breakfast and bring it up to her.

She’d given him a T-shirt last night; it’s too tight on him and nothing else had fit at all. Now he pokes through the closets until he finds a long sleeve shirt he can tie around his hips. Dignity marginally satisfied, he moves on with his mission.

Unwilling to gamble on the house’s revised plumbing extending to the toilets, he takes care of the first out in the trees at the edge of the property. On the way back, he stops at the fallen peach tree. Borer insects had eaten out the inside of the trunk some time ago and it had slumped over to the ground, but it’s still valiantly hanging onto life and making peaches. He breaks a few off to take in with him.

He could stay here, he thinks. Sara had the right idea with being a lone survivor. Hunt deer, eat peaches, and never give the government another dollar because there’s no government and no dollars. Sounds like all the things he’d dreamed of while he’d been so lucky as to be employed.

Autopilot has him placing the peaches beside the kitchen sink to wash and then he has to stop and survey the kitchen to figure out exactly what he’s working with here. Charcoal burner tray perched on the grates of the old gas stovetop, jug of water boiled the day before, broken glass still along the back edge of the counter from when the mech blew out the windows.

He has to compose himself in the now and start over. Kettle beside the charcoal burner, steel tin of- he smiles. Truly a suburban girl, Sara somehow has rolled oats. He wonders how far she had to go to get those as he sets the kettle to boil and goes to confront his clothing situation.

The water in the basin is dirty, the worlds laziest convection currents of rust hanging over his clothes. It smells. He pokes at it with the wash stick. The murk grows. And here he’d thought he’d managed to get most of it out.

Some of it’s the brown and blacks of dirt and sand, some of it he brought through with him. But the rest, the reek, he doesn’t think he saw a single monster there that wasn’t born human and still this is all blood. He jabs at it, frustrated. He feels as exposed as his legs are and this will takes hours to dry even when the sun comes out from behind the clouds.

He could hope to spend the day in bed with Sara, but the kettle whistles for him and distracts him from his wishful thinking. He pours the water from the wash basin out over the railing of the porch and refills the bucket with fresh water and a bit of soap shaved off of a block with his knife before he goes to tend the kettle.

He pours three bowls of water; two for oatmeal and one to clean his knife and hands in before he prepares the peaches. The search for sugar turns up honey so badly crystallized that it’s almost completely solid but that’s good enough- he can break it up to contrast with the moderately under-ripe peaches.

The floorboards creak under his feet and Sara rolls over to look at him. She’s clearly been awake for a little while already, lazing in the strengthening morning sunlight with her long blond hair sprawling out around her like her own sun-rays.

“Oh, there you are.” She smiles.

“Morning. I made breakfast.” He passes her a bowl and spoon after she sits up and then sits under the blankets beside her.

“So what was it like in the other world?” She asks like it’s nothing, like it’s a little vacation he went on. “Tell me about it.”

“Hell.” He says. It’s not a protest until he continues. “Do I gotta?”

“What changed?”

“What?” He says, not following her train of thought in the slightest.

“You like telling stories, but you don’t want to talk about this one.” Sara looks at him. “You had sex with him while he was here, but you say you didn’t while you were there. What changed?”

“Well.” It’s too damn early for emotions but then he’d never really be ready for this conversation.

A week in the woods with naught but weirdly feral skitters to interrupt his thoughts and he still doesn’t have an explanation that makes sense to himself, much less to anyone who'd never met Julian. “Julian turned out to not be exaggerating even a little bit about being a serial killer and his, husband I guess, is literally an eldritch abomination.”

Sara stares at him. He puts oats in his mouth so he doesn’t have to say anything for a while.

Finally she speaks. “What the _fuck_.”

“It was hell. Literally hell.” John shrugs and then because the desire to explain and be known is rising in him, keeps saying words. “Here he was charismatically deranged and more interesting than-” He waves vaguely and sighs. "I was bored stupid." 

“I don’t understand what any of that means.”

He tries for flippant or maybe reassuring only to land far short of either. “Me either.”

Silence falls but now that he’s pulled the cork on the whole damn thing, the need to explain grows inside him. It’s like holding back a flood with a piece of paper, he wants someone to understand even if it’s not him, like explaining it will make it make sense to himself. Like it’ll put something he doesn’t know what  _right_ .

Boiling in his chest and his heart, he’s gonna rupture if he doesn’t do something and he still doesn’t know where to begin.

“Fuck.” He says ineloquently before shutting up again.

“Yeah?"

“Yeah.” He agrees, words tangling up inside him. “I want to explain, I just- don’t-.”

“It’s fine.” Sara says.

“You’re sure?” He doesn’t believe, doesn’t know which thing is fine; he can’t believe. He fucked a man, and she’s not got a question about that.

“Sure. If I wanna know your sordid details, I’ll ask.” She replies bluntly.

“What if I want you to ask?” He challenges. Sara could make him talk and he would let her. Maybe he needs it, it would be easier.

“Why’d you yell at me?” She responds quickly.

“Wh- oh.” He falls silent, trying to make it neat but there ain’t nothing neat about-. So he hums a little bit from a song he’d heard years ago before the invasion. “ _We’ve_ _been sniffing that cocaine/ain’t nothing better when the wind cuts cold/lord it's some mighty hard living_.”

He’d found the song when he’d been looking for solace from other losses and the only thing he really found was _us too_. Us too with the aches in our souls and the debts in our pockets. “I lost half my friends that way. Cocaine, meth, oxy. Just to get by, you know?”

She nods, solemn, weary, over familiar. “I know.”

“A workplace injury turns into an addiction turns into- shit. I couldn’t lose you that way too, and that’s all I could see.” He finds her hand and holds it. “I won’t let it happen again.”

“You’re lying but I believe you.” She squeezes his hand. “Is there even any of the hard shit left?”

“This isn’t what I meant when I wanted you to ask me questions.-” Sara snickers, interrupting him and he relents- “I’ve found some in houses and cars. I leave it alone except for what the colony can use. Haven’t found any around here yet- there’s a lot of water damage.”

“I don’t care that you had sex with a man, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Sara says abruptly.

John slouches down, called out. “Really.”

“I literally do not care.” There’s nothing reassuring in her tone; it’s a challenge.

“Why?” He asks before he can help himself.

She narrows her eyes at him. “I’ve fucked women before and it would be just a tad hypocritical of me to judge you for it.”

“Oh.” John says, imagining it. “Hot.”

The scowl becomes real and he’s just getting the idea that he did something wrong but he doesn’t know what when she hits him with the next question like a load of bricks.

“Do you like getting fucked up the ass? Because the idea of you bent over something, so fucked out you can’t say all those stupid words and a fat load dripping down your thighs is really doing it for me right now.” There’s something in her tone like when she’s messing with him but colder, more frustrated.

“I-no, what.” John fumbles, uncomfortable for a flurry of reasons not the least of which is that image is way hotter than it should be and she’s just got the attention of his dick. “He didn’t fuck me like that.”

“Really.” She actually seems surprised. “You fucked him?”

“I fucked his boyfriend.”

Sara whistles. “Homewrecker.”

“Not this time.” He gives her a crooked grin, making a joke out of treacherous ground.

She laughs and it’s a relief.

“Well, if you ain’t been fucked like that, you’re missing out.”

She just lays that offer out there. Just like that. He gets this flash image of her, proud and naked, with Julian’s red strap-on jutting up in front of her and that isn’t right. That isn’t right.

He shakes his head, more to get away from the image than in negation. “How _are_ you gonna put a load in me?”

“I have my ways.” Sara winks.

“C’mon!” He wiggles down more so that he can lay beside her legs with his head on her lap. “Tell me.”

She weaves her fingers through his hair before skritching behind his ear. “I’ll put enough lube in you to make it drip when I pull out after fucking you.”

Things that come sealed in bottles are a precious resource, and he feels like he remembers lube having an expiration date. “Seems like a waste of lube.”

“Sure, but your little flinch when you feel it is gonna fuel fantasies for at least a year. It’s  _totally_ worth it.”

“Wow, okay then.” He squishes his face against her thigh until she laughs.

“So what do you want from me?”

John rolls a little to look up at her. “Baby, you’re the one who drugged me, took my truck, and then tried to hop on my dick almost as soon as I was awake. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here but. But you’re still somehow the nicest thing that’s happened to me since the invasion and I'd like to keep doing this.”

"Fair enough." She laughs. "What do you want from me right now?"

"Uh." Sara is _probably_ talking about how he'd accidentally poked her leg with his dick. The long sleeve shirt he'd tied around his hips had slid up uselessly far when he'd moved down to her lap and he's indebted to her sleep pants, really. He doesn't want to ask, to make a demand, still too fragile. "I dunno."

Sara flicks his head. "Useless."

"Lady's choice." He counter offers, kissing her leg up to her hips.

"You're playing with fire." She warns him, gently amused.

John has a flash image; Julian's hand raised, Rasher's blood on his rings, Rasher laughing, goading. He opens his eyes, filling his brain with the sunlight and the unfamiliar homeyness of the farmhouse bedroom. "You'll be gentle with me, whatever you choose."

"Ah, I can do that."

It's her easy acceptance of it that really brings him back. Despite the aliens, this world, his world, has rules. He understands some of them, even, enough to not be fearful all the time. "You can burn me later. Today I just want- this."

They stay like that for a long time, Sara slowly petting his hair and John cuddling her legs.

Sara breaks the peace with a groan, “Ugh, gerroff me, I gotta pee.”

Reluctantly, John moves to let her up and then what the hell, hauls himself to his feet too. He should take the bowls down to be washed and hang his clothes to dry. While Sara seems to appreciate the indignity his T-shirt and tied slong sleeve shirt gives him, he’d like to have pants again. Too many bugs and tall plants these days.

Downstairs and outside, he catches Sara watching him wring out his jeans. It’s a desperate bid to make them dry quicker under the overcast sun and stagnant air. She seems amused, so he flips her last question back at her.

“What do you want from me?”

“Right now? Or in general?”

“In general.”

“Don’t be a dick.”

“C’mon, that’s the only thing I’m good at, just ask anybody.” He can’t keep the self-depreciation out of his voice.

She gives him a serious look. “I did.”

Well shit, now she knows he’s a selfish bastard through and through. It’s over now, any hope of this lasting. John starts to say something but she shushes him, speaking bluntly. “The consensus is that you’re an asshole but also that you care despite your best efforts. Weaver-” and here she grins- “had some really choice words regarding your little moon trip stunt. Uh-uh, not for sharing, he believed you were dead.”

“I talked to Maggie, too.” She says, and his flicker of hope curls up and cries again. “What I want is for you to care about me like I’m one of them and never ever pretend that you care when you don’t. Don’t fucking lie to me.”

He nods dumbly. “I won’t.”

Sara stares at him expectantly. “But _what.”_

“I don’t know myself sometimes.”

Sara nods. “Trust me. Talk to me before you fuck yourself up and you’ll be fine.”

He doesn’t know what to do with his hands now that his clothes are all hung to dry and he doesn’t have pockets. “I’m already fucked up.”

She snorts. “Sure, so’m I. You missed the important part of that which is where you talk to me instead of assuming that I telepathically know your emotions better than you do yourself.”

“Oh.” He says, processing that. No telepathy seems fair. “Okay. I think I can do that.”

“Good.”

“Okay.”

There’s a pause where they look at each other, topic abruptly concluded in agreement. He scrubs his hands on the shirt tied around his hips. “What now?”

Sara makes a faux considering face. “I believe you owe me a blowjob.”

“I’m not getting down on the floor again; my knees are still fucked up from yesterday.”

Sara grins. “Come upstairs.”

He rolls his eyes and follows her through the house.

§

He catches her at the top of the stairs, pulls her back against him, picks her up just a little and topples them over onto the bed. They land together all tangled up and her weight half on him knocking the breath out of him. But it’s worth it, so worth it because he can wrap her up in his arms and cling.

Sara giggles and kicks out, freeing herself to roll over and kiss him. He enjoys her force, her certainty, her infectious confidence.

She goes for his throat, knocking his head back to kiss under his jaw. Momentarily he is helpless, he puts his hands up to cradle her ribs, thumbs pushing up under her breasts.

She wiggles, he realizes that she’s stretching and grins up at her. He wants to lift her and kiss her breasts and her belly and feel her squirm like that more. But she’s got him pinned at the hips and her hands on his chest and  _oh_ it’s delightful. He rocks her with his hips.

She makes a soft greedy sound. “Come on, I wanna see you.”

Her murmur is oddly intense for all that she got an eyeful of him yesterday and this shirt doesn’t leave much to the imagination. She rears back, grounding him with her weight on his hips and legs; he comes upright with her.

She runs her hands up his sides under the shirt, rucking it up and leaving the hot traces of her hands on his skin.

“Greedy.” He helps her, getting thoroughly tangled up for a moment.

“Of course.” Sara agrees, grabbing his tits as soon as she can.

“Hey!”

“What?” She’s grinning, playfully pinching at his nipples.

He moves to lift her shirt.

“Nuh-uh.” She puts her hands on his and slides them back down to grab her ass and damn, her grip is strong.

“???”

Sara winks. “I don’t want you getting distracted from your mission.”

“It seems that you’re the one distracted.”

She kneels up over him and he kisses at her belly. “Hm, I don’t think so.”

He slides his fingers under the waistband of her sleep pants and slides around to the front, tugging at them. “These are gonna be in my way.”

“Suppose so.” She responds ambivalently, like it’s his problem.

Sara attempts to remove her pants without fully getting off of him and fails spectacularly. He helps by accidentally tipping her over on her side at which point they finally manage to separate her from her pants and underwear. With a laugh, she’s back up and straddling his face. There’s no shyness to her, no shame at all in her want.

John gently pushes her back a little so he get his palm against her pussy, figure her out, warm her up a little before he gets his mouth in trouble. He drags a finger up between her slick folds and underneath her clit but doesn’t push into her at all and she groans and thrusts against his hand.

He grins up at her and keeps doing that thing with his hand and she’s giving him this wide eyed look and sort of pats his face, eventually covering his mouth with her hand and whispering  _oh my god._

“I forgot how fucking  _good_ it is when someone else does it.”

He’s still grinning when she releases his mouth.

“I asked for a blowjob.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Oh,  _you’re cute_ .” She purrs.

Her words feel like hands on the back of his head, desire in his brain. He wants to give it to her, anything she wants.

She reaches down, spreads her labia and presses her clit to his lips. “Suck.”

He does.

He can’t quite get her clit in his mouth but he can hold it with his lips and rub the end of it with his tongue and she seems to fucking love that. She keeps trying to fuck his face and he’d call her rude but he likes it too.

Sara pauses for a moment, panting. “Fuck, put a finger in me.”

Oh fuck yes. He slides his middle finger between her folds, stroking until his finger dips into her a bit more with each time until she grabs his hair and swears for him to fuck her. Only then does he slide his finger in and she makes the most incredible series of sounds.

“That good?”

“Oh fuck yes, come  _on_ .”

He pulls her back to his lips and almost before he’s ready, she’s pressing again, taking it for herself against him. All he can do is hang onto her butt with one hand.

She pulls away a little, taking his hand with her. She rubs her own clit, telling him how to move his hand for her. It sets up a steady finger fucking rhythm, but she’s doing a lot of the work and he wants to do more-. She sinks down a little, squishing against his curled knuckles with gasps in her mouth. Soon after that he feels her come, clenching down on his finger so tightly it feels like she’s gonna break it.

“Fuck.” He breathes.

Breathless, wordless, momentarily sitting on his chest, she giggles at him. She rolls off of him to slump against the headboard. Not boneless but in relaxed disarray.

John rolls over on top of her legs, propped up on his elbows to look up at her and abruptly rediscovers his erection when it drags against the sheets below. He makes an undignified sound somewhere between a moan and a yelp and she snickers at his distress, petting his hair. “You want help with that?”

He whines at her, pathetically rocking his hips.

Sara gathers his hair up into her fist, loosely until she pulls gently. “If you don’t suggest something, I’ll blue ball you.”

He shivers. He says, “You’re so fucking pretty.”

“That’s sweet.” She shakes his head, prompting him.

“You…” He pauses and then huffs it out in a laugh. “I think you owe me a handjob.”

Sara blinks at him. “Surely you want more than that.”

He shrugs. “Yes.”

“Oh, you’re sneaky.” She pulls harder forcing him to scramble up to relieve the pain. “Trying to make it my choice again.”

He ends up straddling her lap, dick making a tiny damp spot on the belly of Sara’s shirt. He grins at her with more confidence than he’s feeling. “Well?”

Sara pulls his head back before releasing him. “Then that’s what you get.”

She spits in her hand and grabs his dick and he- “O _h-_ ”

She’s not a tease, not until he’s got his eyes squeezed shut and his face pressed to her shoulder.  _Then_ she toys with him, trailing her thumb around the head of his dick.

She turns her face into his neck like she’ll kiss but between them they’ve got too much long hair in the way for that to work and he’s too busy clinging to her to figure it out. Instead she says, low and challenging. “I’m going to fuck you. Not today, but soon. And you’ll beg me for it.”

It’s her certainty that does him. “No-” He says, meaning that he’s tired of people deciding how his life is gonna be and “Please-” meaning that the idea she dumped into his head earlier is still messing with him and “Sara-” and he chokes on it as he comes into her hand.

She pulls his head up with her other hand. “Here, look at me, clean this up.” And then presses her hand to his lips to make him lick his cum off of her palm so he gets in between her fingers with his tongue until she laughs and calls him a _good boy, that’s enough_ and he feels jerky and overwhelmed by the everything that just happened.

“John-” Sara starts.

“Don’t.” He nuzzles into her shoulder again before rolling down to the bed to snuggle up against her hip.

“Thanks for breakfast.” She says, and he nods. They exist like that for a while, coming back to themselves, before she says, “I’m hungry again.”

He huffs. “C’mon. Time to face the midafternoon.”

§

“So what are you gonna do now that you’re back and not dead and all?”

John tips the kitchen chair back, shrugging his shoulders. “When my jeans are dry, I figure I’ll go over to the colony and get my backpack from whoever has it and make just enough of a ruckus to remind them that they don’t want me. And then come back here.” He drops the chair back to four legs. “I figure I ain’t done apologizing yet.”

“You figure  _right_ .” Sara grins.

John lifts a hand. “Mercy.”

Sara sighs. “I do want to rejoin the colony. Just not yet. The-. That was a lot.”

Tom probably gave the massacre some kind of grandiose name to make up for the loss but that doesn’t ease how hard it had hit the colony in both manpower and resiliency. John nods. “I’m sorry that was your first experience with them. They’re usually-”

She watches him, waiting for him to continue his thought. He’s not sure he was going somewhere with that but he’s committed now. "In Boston I ran a tavern. We were actually a colony then, trying to plant roots.” He sighs, shaking his head. “All I want is to have a garden.”

She leans forward. “What did you do, before?”

“Odd jobs, and not well.” John has to divert from that; he can’t think about it. Not now. “How did you make it as a lone survivor?”

“Farming simulators.”

“Farming-. What?” He feels like he should know what that is.

“Videogames. I played them at work.” Sara shrugs. “It’s way harder than it looks.”

“ _No shit_ .”

There’s a slightly awkward pause before Sara continues, “I moved around a lot and stayed away from large groups of people.”

John quirks an eyebrow at her, letting her desire to join the colony speak for itself.

She huffs. “Like you’ve never been horny or lonely before. C’mon, I’m ready to try being a citizen again. I've missed talking to other people.”

“Sara, are you using me for my connections?” He asks, mock serious and then suddenly momentarily viciously afraid that it's the truth.

“Oh, fuck  _no_ . I just want to hang out with people sometimes. It gets lonely with just my thoughts and I’ve already read all of the books twenty mile radius.”

He gets up and collects their dishes to scrub down. “Mason’s thoughts ain’t much these days.”

“Wasn’t talking about Mason.” Sara responds. “He’s gone a little crazy.”

“What’s he done now?” John asks, alarmed.

“He’s encouraging his fighters to be reckless. Some sort of frenzy for the final battle, but I don’t see how he knows that this is gonna be over soon. It’s just gonna get people killed.”

“What the fuck, he was always pretty reasonable about it before. Stupid, but not deliberately reckless at least.”

She doesn’t respond for a bit and he’s almost about to ask her how she still wants him even after she’s talked to Maggie when she continues, “Someone let a skitter in over the walls and Tom just stood there and watched two guys catch it and beat it to death until Weaver put an end to it. Like, it was caged when they went in on it.”

“Good fucking riddance.” He says, but he can feel her gaze on the back of his neck. The only good skitter is a dead skitter, and he’ll stand by that, but there’s no reason to draw it out; bullet through the brain and move on. “That’s really fucking weird. Unnecessary violence towards skitters is my schtick, he can’t be missing me that much.”

It’s not a funny joke and Sara merely huffs out a laugh for it. The silence after weighs on him. “How’s Maggie doing? I bet she’s gonna be disappointed that I’m back.”

He scrubs while she thinks about her words.

“She doesn’t like you and for good reason, but she says that you’ve changed for the better and that she’ll kill you if you go back to your old ways.” Sara pauses. “She says she explained that last bit to you.”

“Yeah, she sure fucking did.” Maggie had put her pistol under his chin and told him that she’d leave his body in a ditch if she ever heard that he or anyone in his circle of influence had raped someone. There’s not a lot of people who would actually back up their threats but he had no doubts about Maggie’s capability and willingness to put him down like the dog he used to be.

And he’s just as certain that Maggie had explained to Sara what he’d done, about the airstrike, about everything. He regrets tolerating Cueball, he’s not proud of some of the things he’d done directly after the invasion. But she’s also one of the very few that he’d hand his rifle and last magazine to and trust that she’d do the right thing. Done with the dishes, he leans back against the counter. Sara is gazing into space, somewhere over his shoulder in among the planks nailed over the window.

She focuses, looking directly and intensely at him, “Nothing’s simple, John, but I want to try.”

“Thank you. “ He says, unsure for what. All of it, maybe, everything that’s allowed him to stand here and offer ammends. “The light’s going, do we wanna sleep?”

“Yeah, we got a long walk ahead of us tomorrow.”


	4. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Sara pay the colony a visit, and John meets up with some people from before and they end up spending the night.

Sara rustles him awake at sunrise. The sky still has navy in it, in addition to the burning red and peach, by the time they set out. The forest is lush and noisy, overwhelming with the constant shriek of cicadas and peeper-frogs that fall briefly silent as they pass by. Since their presence is already marked, there is no need to keep quiet and they talk a little as Sara plays the guide and leads them through.

She’s confidently moving through the woods, she’d traded her shotgun for a rifle and she seems comfortable with it. He says, “You’re beautiful.”

She doesn’t stop, but she does laugh before jumping down from a rock. “Things have changed.”

“Yeah?” He offers.

She doesn’t say anything for a while. “Maggie taught me how to be good with my rifle, not just lucky.”

Maggie is one of their best; he wouldn’t have anyone else teach Sara her way around a rifle. Sara stops abruptly and he nearly collides with her back. “Skitters. 12 and 2, leafline. Stay put.”

He’s barely spotted them before she’s shot twice, knocking them out of the trees, another three shots and she’s killed them.

Sara looks around critically but neither of them see any more skitters. She pops the magazine out of the rifle to exchange for a full one before reloading the used one. “The colony has lots of moving targets to practice on.”

“Woah.” He says, awed and still hung up on her new-to-him accuracy. “Wait, what, how many skitters are there now?"

“C’mon. Let’s get moving.” She shrugs. “We don’t know, but they’re coming in waves and a break in the onslaught is how I got out last time.”

“…they’re under siege and we’re just gonna walk in.” He’s wondering why this didn’t come up in their trip planning.

“Yep!” Sara says cheerfully. “They’re pretty disorganized, kinda like the overlords can’t control them? and not many are circling around the back way, so that’s how we’re getting in.”

There’s little but expanding woods and empty suburbs until they reach the highway that borders this side of the city that the colony is occupying. It’s four lanes with a wide median, and then an abandoned plaza with a derelict taco truck sinking into the parking lot. They’ll be able to see the barricade around the encampment when they get beyond this plaza.

There’s not a lot of cover, for them or for skitters. Sara points at the detached pawnshop building. “Over there?”

It looks clear, and like a good vantage point to get behind the plaza. “Let’s go.”

And then they hop from building to neglected heap until they can see the gates- and smell the dead skitters piled up along the road. The bodies are decaying where they fell and in places they’re piled up to shoulder height.

The way is clear of live skitters and Sara takes off into the wall-like miasma of putridity for the gate beyond the stench. It’s already too late to take clear breath so he promises himself anything and bolts after her.

The guards sight them quickly, shouting their names and scrambling to get the gates open. The stench is more bearable up close to the gate, marginally upwind and he wants to sink his hands into the twisted metal and climb right up and over it because cranking it open is taking way too damn long.

They wait together for the gate to open enough to let them in. Sara says, “Looks like people missed you.”

“Can’t wait.” John replies grimly. The gate doesn’t take much longer to open and then they’re on the inside and news of his arrival is spreading rapidly.

“Pope? Is that- holy shit, it’s Pope! Someone get Weaver!” The cry rises up around John as he follows Sara into the colony. People are filtering out of the ruined buildings and side streets to gawk at him. Sara keeps glancing at him and already he wants all of them to stop. Up ahead, Weaver appears, looking more tired and weary than John’s ever seen him, except that time he lost his daughter  _again_ .

"Fuck.” He swears to himself, striding towards Weaver. It’s awful to see the man like that.

He pulls the older man into a hug, slapping his back like time hasn’t passed. “It’s so fucking good to see you.”

Weaver still looks like he’s about to cry. “We thought you were _dead_ , John.”

Shit, fuck. “C’mon old man, you know I can’t be kept down,” John tries to joke.

Weaver pats his back and pulls away. “Yeah, yeah, whatchya been up to?”

Mason appears then, and John had been significantly dreading this encounter. He looks back at Sara and she’s talking to Maggie. He’s on his own here.

“Tom Mason!” He crows and Mason sort of flinches at his exuberance. John’s spitefully proud of that. “How ya been, you fucking bastard?”

Mason slings an arm over his shoulders and steers him out of the public eye and into a secluded spot of rubble. Damage control, already, it’s what he deserves. “I’ve been fine, Pope. I only lost a daughter.” His tone is brutally tolerant until they’re sheltered from everyone except Weaver, who’s shadowing them at a distance.

“Where’s Lexi?” Mason demands.

“She’s dead, Tom.” John says, finding out that he means what he says next as he says it. “I’m sorry.”

Mason sort of crumples. John reaches out and pats him awkwardly. “It was quick.”

He hopes, between him and God, that he’s not lying about it. She didn’t deserve much, but she deserved that much.

“Why did you come back?”

Why. Now, how; it cuts him, feeling like his presence is an affront. Of course it is. “ _Why_ , Tom? Where else am I supposed to go?”

“You were gone for a week after the power core stopped, Pope. Where were you? Why now?” Mason demands desperately.

“She died for you. All of us, really. Tom, she did what she wanted.” He says, knowing he’s evading, knowing that Tom doesn’t want to hear it. Didn’t before he left, doesn’t now.

“How do you know that?” Mason demands again.

“She’s telepathic. She put it into my head and believe me, there’s not a goddamn thing I could do to stop her.”

“Why-” Mason chokes. “Why didn’t she-”

John grips him by the shoulders. “You’re the leader of the opposing forces _and_ , basically, her step-father. You’d never really believe her and she couldn’t live with that.”

“She trusted you instead of me!”

“We both went up there to die.” It just comes out of him. He didn’t mean to say that, like that, but there is now. He’s burning up, throat seized on it. He drags in a breath and keeps going, digging the hole deeper. “We both knew what we were doing and _so did you_. You don’t get to pretend now that you thought otherwise. She knew that nobody down here would trust her, not even if she succeeded and came back. Familial duty doesn’t change that, Tom. The people here love you, God knows why, but they’d never love her and she saved you _the embarrassment_ of having to choose between her and yourself.”

The words pour out of him, violent and desperate, he has to make Tom understand that the individual decision is out of his hands but that he crafted the circumstances that make those terrible decisions the only right choices.

Tom is limp in his hands, shocked. He repeats, “She picked you over me.”

“She could have killed me with a thought, Tom. She wanted to. But we wanted the same thing, that’s why.”

Tom pushes his hands off of his shoulders and shakes his head. He looks as wrung out as John feels. “I didn’t want you to die.”

“That’s not your choice to make.” John replies bitterly. “When you ask for volunteers, you _have_ to accept that we’ve got names and families. Every single one us is as important as the other and I won’t let you pretend that the people who’s names you don’t know are any less of a sacrifice than me, or Weaver, or _your sons and daughter_ , you ungrateful piece of shit.”

He turns away from the wreckage that he’s made and Weaver is standing there staring at him, stunned.

John walks over to him. “Where’s my stuff?”

Weaver fish-mouths at him.

John desperately wants to leave now. “Don’t tell me it’s been destroyed.”

“No, it’s-” Weaver starts. “You better follow me.”

Mason shouts after him. John ignores him. 

He’s on the other side of giving a shit now but he’s still not ready for what he sees when Weaver leads him to his former squat.

Weaver apologizes again, “We thought-”

There’s a memorial built up where his mattress used to be, a plank with his name and dates cut into it propped up across two upended crates. His backpack is below the plank between the crates. There’s little bunches of wildflowers tied by their stems and hung to dry. There’s no candles- they haven’t really had candles since the concentration camps but there’s little bowls filled with smooth rocks that fill that sentiment.

He chokes, a sob clawing its way out of him by every means possible, and then another. Weaver pats his shoulder uncomfortably. 

He stumbles forward, to his knees, grabbing his pack and swinging it onto his shoulders. He staggers back to his feet, shoving blindly past Weaver and out into the street.

Up ahead, Maggie and Sara are talking in the middle of the road. He’s gotten used to seeing people in the middle of paved streets by now but there’s something oddly holy about this, a grey canyon filled with rubble and the barricade with Sara in the middle glowing like an angel. Above her the sky is white-grey and then she’s haloed as gunfire starts up again on the barricade behind her. 

John bolts towards her.

She catches him, almost swinging him around from his momentum and says “Looks like we’ll be stuck here for a while.”

“Just what I wanted.” He bares his teeth. “Give me a gun.”

“Follow me.” Sara takes off towards the barricade in Maggie’s wake.

They’ve got a system in place now; colony teenagers who want to help are running ammunition and spotting the walls for adults with guns. He’d be impressed with the coordination but he’s still too fucking angry. He ends up shoulder to shoulder with Sara, ear plugs in, focused mindlessly outward on the endless stream of skitters. They’re like a wave, like lemmings, like goddamn 8 foot tall locusts. The corpses pile up and the skitters don’t seem to notice or care, just running up and over the dead ones.

And then they stop almost as abruptly as they started.

When he moves, his shoulder aches from the rifle recoil, spent brass clatters off of his boots and down into the barricade. Sara is saying words but he can’t hear them, can’t read them on her lips, can’t taste them in the air.

He pulls the earplugs out and it helps but he needs to start over. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She says, confused, “Are you?”

“I don’t think I’m gonna strangle Mason if I see him, so yeah, I’m good.”

“Great, let’s get the hell down from here before we have to help drag corpses.”

She sounds like she knows that from experience, so he eagerly follows her back into the ruins of the city.

Sara lets him lead after they’re a block inward and almost unconsciously he finds his way back to his old squat, just goes there on autopilot with Sara’s hand in his. Like it’s home, but it’s not anymore. Someone had taken his bed and everything else has already been redistributed to the rest of the colony. All he’s got is what’s left in his backpack and in his hand.

He wonders if he could get his bed back and then realizes that he doesn’t want to stay here.

Sara interrupts his thoughts, “Were you really gonna bring me back to a ground floor apartment that’s missing a wall?”

He laughs. “I would have found a better place. We’ll find a better place.”

It doesn’t carry them far and then they end up standing there looking at his memorial. He steps forward to flip the board over so he can’t see the lettering and sits down between the crates where his backpack was before. Sara sits on a crate beside him and weaves their legs together.

“Blood Drive. The entire world, blood and chaos with no fucking reason for it. No giving a shit just because it’s the right thing to do.” He waves vaguely. “This- has a point, right? Kill enough skitters, kill enough overlords, we win. Get to build a new civilization.”

Sara stays silent, but he’s not got much more to say; he feels so helpless. “Right?”

“We’ll win,” She says, “one way or another.”

He nods. “There isn’t even any fucking food here.”

Sara jiggles her leg against his side. “It honestly wasn’t this bad the last time I was around.”

“We’re getting out of here tomorrow if we can.” He’s got his backpack, that’s all he wanted. He doesn’t want to go hungry again just because Mason can’t keep his shit together.

“For fucking sure.” She agrees.

They sit in silence and growing evening for a while, her hands on his head and his around her ankle.

There’s a rustling at the wall of the building. “Psst, Pope. It’s me, Ben.”

“Fuck off, kiddo.”

Ben comes in anyway, typical kid, and sees them curled up together. “Ew. Anyway, I got something for you. Don’t tell anyone.”

He hands John a battered and rusted can of fruit cocktail.

“The hell did you get this?”

“Found it in the rubble.” Ben says diffidently.

“You’re the hero we need, kid.”

Ben laughs and trots back out.

When Ben’s reasonably out of earshot, Sara says. “We are going somewhere where you can eat me out, and _then_ we’re eating that.”

“How about the other order?” He latches onto the idea immediately, something he can do, and can do well.

“I don’t have time for all that sugar to be near my cunt and you’ll want something to wash the pussy juice down with.”

He kisses her knee, blushing, not that she can see it. “You’re so fucking right.”

He zips the can into his backpack before standing and offering Sara his hand.

The dimness of the evening is working against them but they manage to find a three story row building with only the top floor beaten in. The first floor is dusty with bits of fallen plaster and time, but by the ember of the burning wood he’s using as a torch, it’s not gonna be the worst place he’s ever slept. There’s even bowls and spoons in the kitchen that’s back behind the first floor living room.

He drops his bag onto the kitchen table and something in it clanks. Sara sets the torch wood into a bowl as he tears into his backpack, half convinced that whatever made that strange sound is gonna be a trap. All of his usual things are in there, but there’s also a large unopened bottle of whiskey.

He didn’t have that  _before_ .

He hoists it out. “Hey Sara-” She turns to look, eyes widening. -”Someone sacrificed the good stuff on me.”

“Oh, holy shit, we’re eating first now.” She laughs, grabbing the can and starting to hook it open on some kitchen utensil she’s dug out of a drawer.

He opens the whiskey and takes a swig, fuck wasting it on dirty glasses. It makes him cough. “That’s the good shit.”

“Woah, shit.” Sara grins. “When we run outta this, you gotta come back to life again.”

“I ain’t dying again.” He insists, accepting a spoon that’s been rubbed some approximation of clean on her shirt from her.

“Good.” She agrees.

  
§

After whiskey and fruit cocktail in the remains of the living room, they curl up together in the angles of the pushed together couch and armchairs that make up tonight’s nest, a little tipsy and wrapped up in each other. He tucks one hand between her legs, leaving it in the warmth trapped between her thighs as he kisses her thoroughly. Until she’s squirming and breathless, until she moves his hand herself to cup her cunt and he can press his finger against the hot hollow hiding behind the seams of her jeans.

Sara curls in his arms, pressing his hand, gently squishing his erection with the curve of her hip. He realizes that she’s doing it deliberately and pushes back at her.

“I wanna fuck you.”

“No,” she gasps, “no condoms.”

He makes a low agreeing sound. “I know.”

She pulls his face to hers, to kiss him hard. “I wish I could fuck you.”

“Soon.” He agrees.

“I’m surprised you’re so agreeable to it. Big guys like you don’t usually admit it if they want it.”

“What you said-” He trails off. He’s been thinking about it since Julian first suggested it and the idea won’t let go of him. Especially what she suggested. He wants it more than he’s afraid of it. He wants it more than he hates Julian. Eventually he says like it’s reassurance, “I’ll still be the same stupid loud jerk after.”

“Yeah, no, it generally doesn’t change people’s personalities,” Sara says amused. “Come on, eat me out.”

“You’ll have to-” He grunts and instead of finishing his sentence, tries to roll her underneath him. It hardly works, they get all tangled up and lost in laughter until Sara straightens herself out.

Sara pushes John back, “Lemme just-” She wriggles and pulls her shirt off, groans, then disentangles herself from her bra. “Figured you’d be more forward, too, with that loud mouth of yours.”

His hands land on her smooth sides and he bends right down to faceplant into her tits instead of responding to that. She laughs and grabs his hair, not roughly, just holding on as he explores her body with kisses. They’ve fucked but he hasn’t seen her tits and it’s too dark now to really see anyway. “You’re so soft.”

“The hell does that mean?” She asks, clearly enjoying his attention.

“Feels good.” He mumbles.

“It sure does.” She reaches between them, undoes her jeans, his jeans, before tugging at his shirt until he’s forced to take it off.

She runs her hands up his body, “God, how did I get so lucky?”

Sara pulls him down, hips and shoulders and hair, and he delays her by kissing at her breasts, endlessly fascinated by the soft curve of them until she pushes him down to her cunt. He gets busy, licking and sucking at her clit and slit until she curses and demands that he finger her too.

It lets him crawl back up her body, one of her legs caught over his arm as he braces himself to kiss her neck and chest as he fucks her with his other hand. He feels desperately uncoordinated, the overwhelming fear of not being good enough but she seems to be loving it anyway.

“Use both hands.” She demands.

He shifts to press his thumb against her clit, stroking the stiff little length of it in time with his thrusts. She grips him way too tightly with her legs, “Harder, fucking- _harder_.”

He abandons finesse and any delicacy this might have had and puts his arm into it and then she’s gasping and her orgasm traps his fingers for a moment, so tightly that he wonders if it’ll hurt when he finally gets to fuck her and then she’s going slack and happy.

Sara flops back, breathless and satisfied. “I suppose you want to get off too."

“Please.” He mumbles into her tummy.

“Lemme get on top.”

He takes her position, the warm spot in the mess of their clothes and the blanket and she crawls down between his legs and takes his cock in her mouth. It’s a lot all at once; he bites back a gasp. He touches at the sides of her head, her smooth hair, the stretch of her lips, desperately wanting to hold her but not control her.

“S’okay, make some noise for me.” She says, and he can’t see her smirk in the dark but he can feel it in her words and the ghost of her breath across his heat.

Eager to please, he gives up keeping quiet as she works his shaft into her mouth with one hand while she sucks.

“Oh, fuck, please.”

He can feel her amusement and it- he wants to draw this out, drown in the pleasure a little. But he’s in her hands now, it’s damn near her choice when he comes.

“Please,” he asks again, touching her face and head, still afraid of controlling her. “I want to last for you-”

She digs her knuckles into his taint and everything shifts, then she’s fucking him with her knuckles right into her mouth.

He doesn’t want to come immediately anymore but the feeling is expanding inside him, lighting him up, overtaking him in a way that he doesn't know how to handle.

He comes, entire body jerking. She mmphs, surprised and knuckle fucks him through it. He’s gasping and clutching uselessly and then she keeps going, hand on his shaft into her mouth.

“You’re gonna break me.” He gasps, then it hits him again, wringing him out, burning him, hurting him. She finally releases him.

“ _ow_ .”

She snickers, taking a swig of whiskey before curling up on top of him, self satisfied.

“What was that?”

“What?” She blinks at him. “Oh, prostate orgasm. You’re welcome.”

“Holy shit.” He breathes.

“Yeah?” She resettles herself as he wraps her up in his arms.

“It’s never felt like that before.” He feels like he’s glowing.

She giggles.

§ 


	5. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The problems that Mason is causing start to rear their heads, and John takes Sara on a date.

The morning sloshes lean and weak over the horizon. The camp struggles up into it, listlessly trying to find food, or something other than skitter killing to do.

John’s clearing a fire pit into the rubble in front of his and Sara’s new squat as Sara bemusedly watches him work.

“Why?” She eventually asks.

He claps dust off of his hands. Maybe he’ll make seats next. “Civilization.”

“Ah.” She nods. “I’ll go check on the situation at the wall, see if we can leave.”

“Have fun, be safe!”

Sara waves as she walks off.

John digs into constructing a seating area- broken concrete isn’t the most forgiving material to work with, and he’s thinking about the slight ache Sara left between his legs with her knuckles- for some time before he realizes that Anthony is watching him. “What’s up?”

Anthony moves in closer, skeptical of his construction and choosing to remain standing. He speaks like someone other than them might be eavesdropping on their conversation. “They took my gun.”

“Why?” John asks, surprised. Anthony is one of their better shots.

“They think I’m unstable.”

“Yeah, okay.” John doesn’t disagree with the assessment from what he's been hearing, but there’s more than just what Anthony’s saying going on here. Tom had said damn near the same thing after he’d tried to shoot Lexi. “Is this about Denny?”

Anthony momentarily looks impenetrably sad before hardening off again. “It’s about how they’re not letting their best skitter killer _kill skitters_.”

“’Best’ is subjective, bro.” John says jokily before continuing more seriously, “Tom’s a goddamn fool; he said the same thing to me.” Anthony’s eyes widen. “But I trust Anne just enough that if she says you’re a hazard to yourself or the people around you-”

Anthony hisses, turning away. “You’re goddamn one of them.”

John catches at his shoulder. “Anthony, listen to me. We’re all fucked up here, one reason or another. You’ve known me long enough to know that killing skitters is my favorite, but I do other shit to help out too.”

Anthony shrugs him off. “I’ve known you long enough to know that you’ve been a cracker piece of shit since the beginning.”

John goes really still for a moment, yanking back on the urge to just fucking deck him. “Work with me, we’ll get you doing something useful and work back up to skitter killing duty.”

“You’re still a cunt.” Anthony grunts, shaking his hand off and turning away.

“Think about it!” John calls after him. “There's more to survival than revenge!”

Anthony flips him off before disappearing around a corner.

John sighs to himself. “Well, that could have gone better.”

He’s gotta find Anne and ask her who else is fucked in the head, but he figures he can finish off the last 10, 15 minutes of concrete jigsaw before he does that. However, he’s hardly turned back to his work before Weaver appears.

“What’s his deal?”

John looks at him warily, “Y’gotta get Mason to give a shit about his people.”

“Yeah, well,” Weaver trails off with a sigh. “I _tried_ that and look where we are now.”

“Fuck.” John agrees. “Whatchya want?”

“Come with me, Mason’s got a mission that you’re interested in.”

“Yeah? Lemme get my gun.”

Sara saunters up while Weaver’s waiting for him to buckle his gunbelt on. “You going somewhere?”

“Weaver says there’s a mission that Mason wants me on.”

Weaver makes a _that’s not what I said_ sound at the same time Sara says, “I want in.”

“C’mon.” Weaver leads them off to Tom’s dingy headquarters.

When they arrive, Tom, Maggie, and Hal are already there, standing around and chatting.

“So we noticed a little something on the cans last night. Distributed by-” Weaver points at the label on a can. “The place is about 10 miles north. Who wants to go?”

John raises his hand immediately.

Mason looks at him critically. “Not you, you just want to steal it for yourself.”

“Do you really think so lowly of me?” John asks coldly. “I don’t have to like you to see that there’s kids starving here.”

“You’ve stolen shit for yourself in literally  _every_ encampment and ghetto we’ve ever been in.”

John raises his hands placatingly. “I’ll admit it, fighting like rats over a can of beans with Weaver was not either of our finest moments, but all of us here know that can of pineapple wasn’t… public news, Mason.”

Sara interjects. “I’ll go, keep an eye on him.”

Maggie looks between them, clearly trusting Sara a hell of a lot more. “I’ll keep her honest.”

Immediately, Hal follows, “I’ll go too.”

“Great.” John supplies sarcastically. “I was hoping to avoid the Mason family dating experience.”

“Pope.” Weaver says before either Tom or Hal can light off with a retort and really get the scuffle going. “Have a look at the map.”

They all cluster around to work out a route, and it slowly becomes obvious that Weaver is quite unusually not going on the mission. “You’re not coming?”

“Nah.” Weaver says, looking at Tom. “We’ve got corpses to stack, don’t we.”

“Yep.” Mason agrees sullenly.

John looks between them, aware that he’s missing something. “Yeah, okay, let’s get this show on the road.”

“Debrief.” Weaver orders after they’ve all tumbled down out of the cab of the truck they’d gotten really fucking lucky with.

John looks around at the group. Maggie is staring dedicatedly off into space, Hal is staring at her like some kind of besotted fool, Sara has the least seniority of anyone here, and Caitlin’s hiding in the back of the truck with her brother. Seems like John’s leading the clown parade. “Well, we got a truck with all the liquid fuel we could find siphoned into it, full of all the canned goods we could fit into it, a bunch of crates of various snacks, bottled water AND juice, a 12 year old girl named Caitlin and her older brother Brian who’s actually a skitter, oh, and multivitamins for the kids.”

“And?” Mason asks, like he didn’t just say they’d adopted a human-skitter hybrid.

“What?”

“What did you take for yourself?”

“How very fucking dare, prying into a man’s secrets like that.” John unslings his backpack and unzips it. “Lessee: baking sheet, wire rack, tongs, a can of beans because fuck you in particular, some spices, cheezits, and a slightly moth eaten towel. Oh, and condoms. Tell your kids to be safe when they fuck around; you’ve made enough mistakes for the rest of us.”

He hears Sara stifle a giggle beside him. He zips his pack shut again. “I’m gonna go unstale these cheezits so that when Maggie tells Caitlin that she lied and we can’t actually save her brother, we’ve at least got snacks to soften the blow with. You’ll know where to find me.”

And then he just walks away.

John’s fire pit looks desolate without any fire or ash in it. The entire area he’d built in the morning, almost finished, looks forlorn, a strange mix of something that won’t be a comforting sight until it’s used and a reminder of the absolute destruction that they live inside of. He gathers up the shattered wood he’d set aside earlier and dumps it into the pit before venturing inside the building to look for an easy firestarter for that much wood.

He’s well used to breaking into houses for shelter, and taking tools and clothing and canned food. That no longer bothers him- those people are long gone, dead or doing the same things he is somewhere else. But looking for papers to start a fire with, taking calendars off of refridgerators and opening up desk drawers still registers as wrong on some level, these are memories that belong to someone else. Or perhaps nobody at all, and he’s the only one to know them at all, living in their house in this way.

“Those used to be real people.” Sara says when he turns up a pile of cards from the last Christmas before the fall.

He turns the top card over in his hands. It’s weathered yellow on one side, glossy inks ruined by sun and time on the other. A woman with long dark hair and a man with short blond hair, two blue eyed gap toothed children, and a dog all embrace and smile up at the camera. Merry Christmas! All the time and people that have passed stretches out in front of him as he looks at it.

“As real as anything’s ever been.” He says, dipping the card into the flame of his lighter until it catches enough to slide in among the splintered wood. “What’s the difference between rotting in a landfill and being used as a firestarter?”

Sara shrugs. “Well, that’s maudlin.”

“Shit’s fucked up here.” He cracks a bitter grin. “Anne’s got a can of pineapple in the infirmary and it’s gonna get out that there was more than one. Sure, there’s food _now_ but Tom’s gonna have a mutiny on his hands, he’s gonna blame it on me one way or another, and I gotta get out ahead of that.”

“Shee-it.”

“Glad you joined up yet?” He asks sarcastically.

“Y’all got drama, I might go back to hiding in the woods.”

“The dream.” He says dourly.

“So who usually talks back to Tom around here?”

“Ta-daa.” John waves his hands sarcastically. “It’s me. I headed the worker’s union back in Boston, too. Tom tried to sell us out to the US Army and none of us wanted to go, so we stopped work on the army trucks. The army decided we were ‘unruly’ and backed out of negotiations.” He grimaces.” I contracted to supply ammunition in exchange for spent brass, harvested mech alloy, and medical supplies. It worked out for a couple of months and then my courier- Brent- turned up for a delivery in civvies with a nearly empty pack and a bad case of the shakes. He never did say what happened.”

“Jesus.” Sara says quietly.

John shrugs. “Tom has to be reined in. Neither of us is in the right all the time, but- I been talking to Anthony and he’s talking some shit and I think there’s other people that are pissed off too. Have you heard anything from Maggie?”

“Not Maggie, no.” Sara shakes her head, “But on the down low from the infirmary, and Scott’s wife Courtney. Michelle, Sandy- there’s others. They got issue with how this place is being run especially after Tom’s berserker thing while you were dead.”

John points at her with the tongs. “I’m taking you on a date tonight but tomorrow, let’s get everyone with complaints together and see what we all know.”

She grins. “You starting the mutiny?”

“Not yet.” He says darkly. “Not yet.”

John had cleared the second floor room to make a dining area that would catch the sunset and still have a little privacy. She’d helped with all of it because he couldn’t stop her, but he still manages to make it a treat for her with the food. They kiss, they eat, and they talk. It’s so- normal, somehow, but nothing like either of them had before. A fantasy, a fairy tale.

And because this is not a restaurant, because there is nothing to stop him from indecency, when she’s smiling and drinking her chicory-coffee that’s sweetened with a vanilla hard candy, he comes around the table to her and kneels between her legs to kiss her thighs and her belly and her hips. Her jeans are worn soft and smooth, the inner thighs going threadbare. He’d noticed before at the farmhouse; now he wants to press a finger between the threads and slide against her skin in a secret way. He doesn’t because good jeans are a precious resource and that would be unnecessary damage.

Sara plays with his hair, fingers woven through to the back of his head, warm and steady, or playing with the chunky waves he gets on the rare occasions that his hair is clean. They’d gotten soaps on that warehouse trip too.

He knows that she is warm and fed and cared for and he hopes that she knows that this is what he wants for her, that he wants to give this to her.

He hears her set down her mug and then she tugs at his hair gently. “Come up here.”

He does, for a kiss on the lips, and then she bids him sit on her lap. It feels a little awkward, he’s trying not to be too heavy, her hand is hot across his ribs under his shirt and her face is half pressed to his shoulder.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“No, you are.”

“Oh, shut up.” She pats his ribs firmly, a playful reprimand. “I never thought I’d see it like this.” She trails off.

“A date?”

“At peace.”

It’s not at peace, not really. There’s a lull now, no gunfire from the walls but that won’t last the whole night. John’s been exempt from being called up to fight because he’s a national hero or something, but he doesn’t expect that to last much longer because he’s got Sara tied up with him too.

§

Sitting in her lap doesn’t last long; he’s too sideways and he wants to kiss her completely so he slides down to kneel between her legs. He starts at her knees again and slowly teases his way up to where his hands are resting hot and heavy at the folds of her legs.

“It’s a damn pity that I didn’t bring my strap,” She says contemplatively as he kisses her thighs.

“It is.” He agrees. “Tell me about it.”

“Hm.” She sets her mug down so that she can pull out the shape of it between her legs with her hands and lay the concept of it against his face. He kisses her fingers. “It’s about that big. It’s not realistic, it’s one of those smooth ones, and it’s bright blue.”

She’s curled her fingers up and stuck her thumb out, a small cock for him to suck on and when he murmurs assent to her words around her thumb, she gasps and closes her eyes. Her other hand settles around the back of his head, guiding him.

“I want to- I want you to suck on it until I’m ready to come, then ride your face until I do. I want to trade off fucking each other until we both come. I want-”

He noses in below her knuckles to press over her clit, making her break off with a moan.

“You’re so hot. Please take your jeans off.”

She laughs and undoes her belt and fly as he helps her with her boots. “I love how eager you are.”

He simply tugs at her until she scooches to the edge of her seat so that he can get his face in between her legs and start lavishing the second part of the evening on her.

He starts gentle with kisses, hands broad on her thighs until she demands _more_ and he starts licking over her clit, between her labia. She’s squirming, clutching at him. “You’re being a tease.”

“As accused.” He purrs and licks his fingers for her to see before wiggling on into her.

She groans, drawn out.

He fucks her slowly like that until the curl of his other fingers aches and she’s panting with need.

Abruptly she pats her hips where the pockets of her jeans would be.

“Looking for something?”

“My jeans?”

He reaches into his own pocket and pulls out a condom packet to show her.

“Good boy.” She pats his face. “Get up, we’re going to the couch. I’m gonna ride you until I break you.”

John stands up and stretches in front of her, luxuriously but also joints popping, showing off the cut of his hips as his shirt rides up and the way his erection is pressing against the front of his jeans.

She watches him, smirking, reclining on the scavenged kitchen chair like a throne, before reaching out to press her hand to his belly and slide her fingers down, over his belt, over his bulge; he slouches forward with a gasp.

She stands up, pressing him back against the table edge. His hands slide up under her shirt, skimming it up as she unbuckles his belt. She lets him pull it off of her; her hair falls across her shoulders, catching the colors of the sunset like paint. He leans in to kiss her, to taste the colors that she’s washed in.

“Don’t lose that.” Sara murmurs, tucking her shirt into his back pocket. “Follow me.”

She grabs the loose ends of his belt in one hand and tugs him to follow her downstairs. Their nest from the night before is there waiting for them.

She pushes him gently. “Strip and put that condom on.”

He can’t get naked fast enough, clumsy in his haste to please.

“Don’t hurt yourself!”

Victorious, he flops back across the couch and rolls the condom on, hips rising to meet his hands and he hears Sara whisper,  _aw fuck_ .

Then she’s straddling him, spits in her hand and rubs her cunt quickly, dragging a gasp out, his hands land on her hips, thumbs pressing towards her cunt. She lowers herself down onto him, intense concentration, until she’s seated across his hips.

Hands on his chest, hot and heavy, she rides him slowly, luxuriating for herself until he can’t take it anymore, he can’t be still, he thrusts upwards to meet her and she  _yelps_ .

“Hey!”

He grins and and keeps doing it.

Presses his thumb to her clit. She arches back, sinking down and rocking to move him inside her. “Fuck- please.”

“Don’t, oh fuck, come on-”

Sara pushes his hand out of her way to rub furiously at her clit. He grabs her hips and bangs her down, compressing them together more than actually moving her, again and again and again, she yells out wordlessly. Then- “come on, fucking _come_ , oh, oh fuck-”

They go together, and she lays on top of him panting after.

“That was fun.” She says happily.

He makes a soft sound into the side of her head.

“Nuh uh, no falling asleep while you’re still in me.”

“Not for long.” He mumbles, sliding his hand around the curve of her ass until he can touch where his cock is slipping out of her and prod the mess they made.

She whines petulantly. “Don’t start something that you can’t finish.”

He chuckles. “I’d figure something out.”

She shakes her head gently.

“Lemme clean up and then you can fall asleep on me.”

She doesn’t move despite her sound of assent.

“C’mon.”

She giggles and lets him roll her off.

§


	6. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Sara go on a long walk and have a lil conversation. They return with intel only to find Tom Mason doing war crimes.

“So, do I want to know how we got this intel about the valley?” John asks. He wasn’t aware of any reconnaissance but then he’s only been back a few days.

“No.” Tom says quickly.

Weaver looks at him sternly and waits.

Tom sighs. “Anne and I accidentally let the weird bug that bit me escape and we followed it to its home, which is apparently a valley full of skitters.”

“Like a kid chasing butterflies.” John mutters. “Okay, what are we gonna do about it?”

“Well, we know a couple of things,” Weaver starts. “There’s got to be an overlord controlling an operation that big. Anne says that there’s got to be something there that’s really good for hatching them and feeding them, some kind of environmental thing.”

Anne looks pained by Weaver’s rendition of what she said but stays quiet.

“So we’ve got two assumptions.” John quips. “Do we have any real intel or can we carpet-bomb them with Round-Up?”

“Uh.” Weaver says at the same time that Mason says, “I wish. We don’t have any air support.”

“I think Dingaan was working on something.” Weaver says. “Anyway, we need someone to go find out where the overlord is and how much of the valley they’re using.”

“It’ll be a two pronged attack,” Tom continues, “one against the valley itself and the other against where they’re hatching after the overlord is killed.”

“That’s three attacks.” John mutters to himself. “Hey Sara, wanna go gallivanting around the woods for a bit?”

Tom looks between them. “Please take this seriously.”

“I take skitter killing very seriously.” John says seriously.

“Where are we going?” Sara interjects.

Weaver gestures at the map. “We’re here, they’re there, the overlord might be anywhere in here.”

Anne continues, “Remember that the overlords have a five mile control radius. So this one has to be controlling the whole valley, but isn’t controlling the ones attacking here. I think that once the skitters reach maturity, they come here to feed but get out of control because they’re too far away. The line of control is anywhere in here.”

“Are they like bugs? Are we gonna see skitter grubs?” Sara asks.

“I don’t know for sure, but given the exoskeleton and the Espheni biotech capabilities, they’re probably being grown, which implies a larval stage.” Anne shrugs.

“Huh. I want a copy of this map to take with.” John doesn’t want to be out there on guesswork.

“Yeah, I think we got another, hold on.” Tom rummages around and comes up with a regular fold out road map.

“Good enough. Anybody else want to come with us?” John asks as he starts transferring the markings from the main map to the road map. Nobody does, so Sara prepares their weaponry as he finishes up with the map.

There’s a road most of the way there. It winds a little on the map, but it’s far easier than hacking through the underbrush beside the road and through the woods. It is a shockingly pleasant day for climbing over fallen trees and skirting the huge bushes of poison ivy that have grown up everywhere. They fall to talking as they make progress towards the valley.

It’s easy talking, mostly, interrupted by navigating the landscape until Sara asks him where he learned to cook. It’s a loaded question, although she doesn’t know it.

“Prison!” He says flippantly. “Never expected it to be my most valuable skill.”

“What’d you do?” She asks, almost too quickly. He might be imagining things.

“Accidentally killed a man for messing with my son.” It comes out blunt, a dare to take issue with his choices even though he himself regrets what all that cost him.

“How do you accidentally kill someone?” Sara pauses. “Sorry, that was rude.”

“I punched him, he fell and cracked his head on the sidewalk. He went into a coma and died. They ruled it manslaughter.” John shrugs like it doesn’t matter. “You should know.”

“What happened to your kid?”

“Kids. Brandon and Sophia. Laura divorced my ass while I was in prison and fucked off to Florida with them. Smartest thing she ever did.” He shakes his head slowly. “You have a man, before?”

“Nah, nothing steady.” She huffs. “Like I said, a bitch gets lonely.”

“Ain’t that the fucking truth.”

The silence drags a little as they range into the forest to get around a small bridge that’s caved into the swamped drainage ditch below but he doesn’t want to leave the conversation there. “You get any weird hobbies after rehab?”

“Rude.” Sara says, “Uhh, puzzle games. Took up knitting for a while. Redecorated my entire apartment. I didn’t have much time before all this.”

“That sucks.” He murmurs sympathetically.

“Eh, I mighta relapsed out of sheer boredom.”

“Come on, don’t say that.” They both know it’s true though and silence reigns for a while longer.

“Augh, what’s that smell?” Sara grouses.

John grimaces. “Fertilizer and manure.”

“Isn’t that the same shit?”

“Not always. Lemme look at the map, we might be close.” Sara stands over him with her rifle ready as he works out their progress on the map. “We’re pretty damn close. Half mile, mile thataway and we should be able to see them.”

John trades his map for his rifle and follows Sara in the direction he’d pointed.

Below them is the valley.

"Jesus." John says after a while. "That's a lot of shit."

Sara doesn't reply; she's pulled her shirt up over her face in a vain attempt to filter some of the stench out.

The valley below is seething with skitters like an ant colony upended into a bowl. They’re all different sizes, some are different colors, more fully formed ones are up closer to the edges, closer to Sara and John, and are tearing the abused vegetation down to the dusty soil. Deeper down in the valley the skitters look like they’re stacked up so deeply that the bottom ones have died, and then John realizes that they’re abandoned exoskeletons and shit piled up like the remains of a tree hit with an invasive species of caterpillar. 

“Well, Anne was right about the grubs.” Sara points, shirt still held over her nose and mouth with her other hand.

There’s more of the smaller paler softer looking ones near a flat rocky outcropping further down the valley. They’re rolling over each other, unable to coordinate all of their legs yet.

“D’ya think that’s where they’re hatching from?”

Sara waves for him to follow; he scrambles to keep up with her. They head along the edge of the valley- it deepens in a way that suggests long abandoned open air quarry until they’re looking down over the rocky outcropping from the safety of a tree.

“That’s a building.” John says slowly, and then it all snaps into focus. They’re looking down on the ruined roofs of a small mining complex, and the skitters have buried the buildings in shed exoskeletons and shit until just the graveled roof is visible. “That’s a _fucking building_.”

“Can we find the overlord and go, now?” Sara sounds distressed.

“What’s wrong?” John asks, immediately concerned.

“That’s way too many bugs on top of each other.”

“Yeah, yeah it is. Let’s go.”

There’s screaming when they arrive back at camp. This is of itself is not incredibly unusual, but it’s coming from inside a building, one of the ones that the colony is using. The one that they’ve been keeping skitter-Brian secured in and Caitlin has been hovering around. Speaking of, he doesn’t see Caitlin hovering.

“What the fuck is going on?” John demands loudly of the small crowd gathered around the entrance of the building.

“Mason is asking an overlord some questions?”

“When did we get an overlord?”

Before John can be answered, there’s the muffled sound of a gunshot from inside the building. The screaming cuts off abruptly.

“Had, I think.” John mutters, shoving his way through the people and into the building. There’s stairs, he follows them down to where he hears a low voice.

The first thing he sees is Mason’s back turned to him, then Ben and Maggie clutching each other with their foreheads together and spikes glowing on the damp concrete floor, and beyond that, an overlord oozing onto the floor of the maintenance cage that they’d been using as a cell for Brian.

“What the _fuck_ , Mason.” John demands. “What did you do to them? Where’s Caitlin and Brian?”

"Caitlin and Brian are dead.” Mason turns to him and John is instantly tracking the pistol in his hand. “What did you find out?”

“Skitter grubs and shit, why don’t you explain to me what happened and why it looks like you shot an overlord while Ben and Maggie were mind linked to it?”

Maggie and Ben push away from each other, the glowing spikes at the backs of their necks finally fading. Maggie struggles to her feet first, helps Ben up, and they stagger arm over shoulder up and toward the stairs. John hopes they run into Anne on the way up because he’s about to chew Tom a new one and nobody else needs to hear that.

Mason sighs. “You didn’t find an overlord, did you?”

“No-” John is taken off guard.

“I think this is the one that I sent you to find, so we gotta move fast now.”

“Yeah, okay, but do you wanna explain to me why it sounds like you shot your son in the head? Because the Tom I knew wouldn’t do that!”

“We captured the overlord that Brian and Caitlin defected to and figured that it had information that we could use.” Tom says slowly. “Ben and Maggie said they could handle it.”

“You’re a god damn idiot.” John stomps in a circle, struggling to contain his anger and frustration. “I drag their asses back to you- you- you’re not fit to be his father, he’s _fourteen_ , he wants to impress you. And Maggie- she knows he’s a kid and is trying to protect him from you!”

He turns on Mason, shoving him back and snarling. “Go up there and act like you care about your kids as much as you say you do. Act like you give a shit for five god damn minutes. Go make sure they're okay.” He hits Mason in the chest again and points violently up the stairs.

“Jesus, okay.” Mason says, shouldering by him to get up the stairs.

And then it’s just John and the dead overlord slumped in the corner. He crouches down in front of it, careful to keep his boots out of the sludgy blood. It looks like all the others to him; no rank or insignia on the uniform, no distinguishing features, no weapons but for the mystery ash in its hand. “The only good overlord is a dead one, but _fuck_ I hope whatever you told them was worth the lives of two kids.”


	7. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are going too well. John accuses Mason of war crimes, and Mason gives John an ultimatum.

The day dawns bright and with a mild threat of overcast on the horizon. Mason has a mission, and John’s not going. He would, normally, it’s killing skitters en masse and he’d even helped put together the chemistry to pull the mission off, but Mason’s taking Hal and Maggie and Anthony and Dingaan and Weaver and John’s still pissed at Mason about what he did to Ben and Maggie the day before.

And they’re expecting retaliation for the overlord yesterday; there’d been an uptick in skirmishes when dusk hit, and then again at dawn. Nothing coordinated, but Anne can’t imagine that an operation that large would have only one overlord, so he stays at the camp, perched up on the barrier with his rifle until a group decides to go out deer hunting and he goes with them.

And when the mission returns in the midafternoon, it’s a victory. It’s an unconditional victory. It’s their first unconditional victory and the high spirits spread like contagion. First the successful resupply mission a few days ago lifting them out of hunger, and now a serious blow to the Espheni’s infantry  _and_ their ability to make new skitters.

John sits further up on his stoop and watches the revelry happen around him. Half of it is in the fire pit area he’d constructed but there’s too many people and they spill out into the street. A few people tease him about how this is a poor replacement for The Nest and he says something pleasant about how he’ll start making moonshine again as soon as he can.

That’s all it is, pleasant; he’s got no grain, no potatoes. Sara’s garden may yield enough potatoes for the two of them together over the winter- or it may not.

The Nest- he hasn’t thought about it as a  _tavern_ in a while. It’s the place that Julian happened to him and he hasn’t taken the time to really mourn it in either capacity. Perhaps he hasn’t wanted to. Boston feels like an eon and a universe ago. It’s not better, and Charleston isn’t worse. There, they were fighting a losing battle. They’d lost, even; they’d been sent to a reservation and they’d been killed on the way there.

He’d called it as a bad idea to agree to the terms of the surrender.

God bless the eternal human spirit.

Sara bumps his shoulder with her leg. “You okay?”

He wraps his arm around her leg, holding her beside him. “Look at them. How long will it last?”

“Lighten up a bit.”

He shrugs. “Was I wrong?”

Sara sits beside him, shoulder to shoulder. “What he did to Ben and Maggie was cruel. I don’t understand how-” She shakes her head. “Let them have it.”

“I am.” He says quietly, leaning his head on her shoulder. “I should go turn the meat.”

She drapes her arm across his shoulders. “Yeah, probably.”

“We could leave. Tonight, if we wanted. The skitters are dead.”

“Tomorrow, I don’t want to be out after sundown.”

“Could do a second raid on the warehouse. Show of good will before we fuck off, and to stock up for us. It’s getting cooler.”

“Always thinking ahead.”

He kisses her shoulder before wriggling out from under her arm. The deer he’d taken today is roasting in strips down in the fire pit and since he doesn’t have hardly any spices to cover his sins, he’s gotta make sure the meat stays juicy.

Although this lot would eat about damn near anything these days.

There’s enough fuel left in the truck’s tanks to do one more mission, so Mason calls him and Weaver together in the morning to find a place to go and it’s Anne who find the county disaster preparedness center on the map. It’s only 20 miles away and it might be ransacked, or it might a fat cache.

And, Mason says, it might have fuel and with that they’d be able to head north, and with radios they might be able to collect other militias into a force big enough to take on a black zone without relying on Cochise to communicate for them.

Only one way to find out.

The nearest black zone is off the northern edge of the state map. It’ll take a long time to get there, even with fuel for the truck, and they’ll need supplies. A lot of supplies.

“You’re not going, Pope?”

“Nah, I figured I’d get some people together and raid the warehouse again. There’s plenty of stuff left there.”

Weaver gives him a curious look, “Equipment and fuel are pretty much your thing.”

“That was before the fuel turned into the world’s nastiest jello. I’m exploring new ventures now.”

Mason sighs. “Okay, so how did you get that truck started?”

“Someone musta filled the old girl up to the top with stabilizers and then we gambled on a push start down the hill.” John shrugs. “Those fuckers are heavy. I doubt we’ll get that lucky again.”

“We  _are_ going a disaster control center, I figure that evens the odds.”

“Good luck.” John says, meaning it. “I hope all of your dreams come true.”

Mason and Weaver unison roll their eyes at him. He grins.

“Get out.” Weaver orders.

He goes.

Mason’s group is leaving early to maximize the daylight; John doesn’t even try have a group together before they’ve headed out because it means that Mason can’t scrutinize his personnel choices, or worse yet, question them.

He asks Anthony, who finds Isaiah, and Sara finds Carly and Carly brings Willow, and Ana and Eric invite themselves when they see the small group forming up. John hasn’t talked to a few of them before; Carly and Willow and Eric and he’s only been tangentially aware of Ana prior to this.

It’s only a few miles into the trek of idle chatter and getting to know each other before Sara says, “You may be wondering why I have gathered you all here today-”

Anthony snorts.

John picks up on the other side, “Mason’s mission today is to try to pick up fuel and radios for a trek up north to make an assault on an Espheni black zone.”

“The hell is he thinking?” Carly insists loudly.

Eric, mostly to himself, says, “Oh, Ryan’s on that mission.”

“Right, he’s not saying in advance where he wants to take the colony, he’s not even asking the rest of us if we want to go on this- mission.” Sara responds. “I’ve talked to a few of you, and I know John has too, we think that Mason should be leading-”

“-Less unilaterally.” Anthony interrupts her again. “He’s acting like he’s the only one who knows what’s right for us.”

“He’s been careless.” Willow says quietly. John’s never really talked to her, maybe Sara has, and all he knows about her is that she was Scotty’s wife.  _He’s been careless_ is generous regarding what Mason did to Scotty in that skirmish; his body had been used as bait for the overlord and there had been no attempt to give him a funeral after.

“He keeps assuming that we all want to fight- it’s not that I don’t want to fight it’s just that I’m not good at it and I don’t want to die when I can be more useful elsewhere.” Willow agrees.

Carly chimes in, “And- no offense to you, Anthony- what we had wouldn’t have lasted us much longer even if it hadn’t been blown up. Scavenging supplies out of abandoned houses isn’t sustainable and frankly this isn’t much better.”

Anthony scowls.

“It’s far too late in the year to start a garden, isn’t it?” Isaiah asks quietly.

Carly responds, “Where would we even get seeds?”

Sara rejoins the conversation, “The house I was living at before here had a big garden attached to it, practically a farm really, and even though it was the second year the garden had self seeded. I don’t exactly have a green thumb but I got it to be even more productive this year.”

“So we could just  _find_ a garden, is what you’re saying.” Isaiah sounds dubious.

“We wouldn’t be starting from scratch, at least. I haven’t got enough to feed everyone but it’s not impossible that next year you all wouldn’t be totally dependent on scavenging.”

“Yeah, but Mason wants to move us again, John said.”

“That’s the problem, innit.”

Carly comes back aggressively, “He keeps acting like we’re gonna win this tomorrow and, sorry to fucking say, but it’s been nearly three years. What’s to say that even _if_ we can conquer this black zone that it’ll win the war?”

“And even if we do win, it’s not like it all will  _un_ happen. We’ll still need to survive and rebuild into the future.” Willow is still quiet.

And that discussion carries them all the way into the warehouse where they set to taking a more proper inventory of what’s there to see what will be best to bring back. They’re on foot; canned goods are heavy, and things in ‘airtight’ bags have gone stale and take up too much space in their packs. Then there’s the question of soap and of if the bottled water is still good because that could be medically valuable.

And then it all goes to shit. It’s quick thinking on Carly’s part that saves them- John’s only real contribution is shrieking really loudly. 

The swarm came in through a shattered window on the upper level, unseen, unheard until the insects started whanging down through grated shelving towards them. The first alarm they get is Ana screaming and running across the warehouse towards them at a flat out sprint, the insects barely visible in the gloom behind her.

John hollers, “Swarm! Take cover!”

But there’s no real cover here; they need a closed room, a sealed box, a fucking flamethrower.

And then Carly’s shouting, “I have tarps! Get under and stand on the edges!”

Ana’s almost to them, they have a handful of seconds before they’re engaged with the swarm. Carly is too far away from the rest of them.

“Take them and go!”

Carly sprints across Ana’s trajectory towards the rest of the group and the swarm hesitates as their paths cross. Ana veers away, Carly keeps going, flings the tarp she’s holding at the group. They have it nearly unfolded when she reaches them.

John runs towards Ana, towards where Carly found the tarp. There’s more there and he’s not fucking losing one of his people to some goddamn carnivorous insects. Ana clearly has the same idea, she’s already flinging one open, together they get under it, desperately gathering the edges under their feet.

And then the swarm hits.

Ana slowly collapses down onto her knees, words he doesn’t understand on her lips. He only sees that she’s holding down more of the tarp edge and follows her down to hold it more securely. Only then does he realize that she’s praying, the cadence familiar but the words strange to him in Spanish. He’s perversely glad; someone ought to, there’s nothing else to do.

It’s almost the most nerve-wracking twenty minutes of his life so far. The swarm keeps bouncing off the tarp, unable to get traction on it like June bugs on a glass window and too dumb to go under it but they hit with all the bruising breaking force of a golf ball. He keeps flinching when they hit, terrified he’ll lose his grasp or one will get under or that one will hit him in the head just right and take him out.

At long last the assault stops. The swarm gets bored, or decides their mission here is completed, or something. They wait another five, ten minutes after that, barely breathing before lifting the edges of the tarps to look around.

The afternoon air, previously hot, feels like a cooling breeze after too many people and not enough air for that long. The warehouse is empty and silent except for their breathing. There’s no piles of bones and cloth where people should be. John immediately goes to Sara, tucking his face down against her neck as she hugs him.

Carly looks around at them, around at the warehouse. “Well. I vote that we pack up and go.”

It doesn’t take long for them to pack up and move out after that, progress made hasty by the fear that the insects would come back, or a larger and more coordinated infantry force to finish what the insects started.

The trek back to camp is also subdued despite the amount of stuff they had managed to gather up and bring with them; they’d gotten lucky and they know it.

John hears the Camaro before he sees it. They’re just done distributing their haul and the sound of it cuts right over the hubbub. He knows in his heart what a 302 small block sounds like, and he just knows that Weaver is behind the wheel because Mason has no goddamn taste.

And then he sees it. Blue and white, chrome in perfect condition. This was someone’s pride and joy. Weaver’s grinning like a boy.

He kind of wants to lick it.

He knows what it takes to fuel one of those. They don’t have the resources for it no matter what’s in the truck.

Weaver hops out. “Ain’t she a beaut?”

“I’m happy for you, Dan, I really am. But man, this ain’t the tow package. What the fuck are we gonna do with this?”

“Tow-” Weaver’s face sort of collapses as he reenters reality. John feels bad about that.

And something else had happened while they were out; he can feel it in the way the party is shifting uneasily around the Camaro and truck instead of jubilantly dispersing into the crowd of people who’d come out to greet them. John demands, “What happened?”

Mason answers instead, standing in the middle of the groups that’s clustered up around the car. “We were attacked by the flying insect swarm and we lost Ryan and nearly lost myself and Dingaan. Despite the overall success of this mission, Ryan’s sacrifice must not be forgotten.”

The crowd goes silent and then starts again like an upset beehive. Mason looks absolutely dead inside.

And then Anne starts yelling. She comes flying down the steps and Mason turns to catch her but misses, she’s moving too fast. She’s yelling at Weaver to open the hood, that she needs the battery, banging her fists on the fender as Weaver takes too long to comply.

Weaver gets the hood open and as John’s lifting it, Anne is already scrabbling at the battery, trying to pull the cables off it to release it.

She’s gonna electrocute herself doing that. He says, “Sorry Anne,” and shoulder checks her out of the way. She staggers back against Mason. John points at Weaver, “Wrench kit or pliers.” Weaver goes to the trunk. John pulls out his buck knife and jams it in under the positive terminal to pry it up, praying the wooden grip will protect him from the shock when he slips.

Mason’s asking what she needs it for, Anne gasps, “AED.”

Someone else says, “That’s not how AEDs work.”

Anne gasps, “Cochise- his father.”

The guy says, “Aliens. Well, what the fuck do we know?” and by then John and Weaver have the battery free from its strap and cables. Anne snatches it and almost drops it, unprepared for the weight of it, runs back up the steps and inside holding it like a baby.

John trails after her with the jumper cables. Anne has set the battery down beside- not Cochise but an older Volm on a table. Cochise is hovering anxiously, as upset as John has ever seen him. Anne grabs the cables from John and as Cochise points, shocks the older Volm a few times.

The older Volm does not respond.

Cochise says, “Time’s up.”

Anne lets out a terrible sob before pulling it all back inside of herself, the appearance of calm flowing over her like a particularly fast mold. She turns to Cochise.

“I’m sorry,” She says unevenly, “for your loss.”

Anne hugs Cochise and Cochise doesn’t react, frozen in grief and bewilderment at Anne’s reaction. He eventually says, “You did your best.”

Anne chokes. “Do you want to do the Ritual of Silence?”

Cochise, still slowly, says, “Yes, I think I do.”

John turns and leaves. This is not for him to witness. He sits on the incongruously bright and sun-warmed stone of the steps outside, and everyone looks at him.

“Cochise’s father is dead. Cochise needs some time.”

People nod and begin dispersing. This they understand.

Weaver sits beside John, shoulder to shoulder with him.

They don’t say anything for a very long time.

Then Weaver starts, “Just so you know. It was the flying insects that got us. Ryan. I hid in the Camaro, Ben and Dingaan in the radio truck, and Mason made it into the shipping container. They got Ryan first. He opened a door and they just mowed him down. Ate his legs to the bone. He died screaming.”

Weaver shakes his head.

John puts his hand on Weaver’s knee. “I’m sorry.”

Weaver shakes his head again. “He didn’t deserve that. But I don’t- there’s no way to stop them.”

“Tarps.” John says slowly, the words foul in his mouth with the arbitrariness of death. “We were hit by them too and we got lucky. Got everyone under a tarp and stood on the edges so that they couldn’t get under. They gave up after a while. I miss that goddamn flamethrower.”

Cochise gathers them up later to talk strategy. The sun is still out, so they set up with their maps on the sidewalk of the building that Mason is using as headquarters. Cochise says, “I came here to tell you that the black zone west of here has cleared up. Whatever happened there caused them to abandon their facility.”

He’s pointing at a Volm map, but John’s always had trouble coordinating the blue spectrum with the way he thinks of the geography. He pulls their strategy map over and lays it out next to Cochise’s. “This area?”

Cochise nods. “Yes.”

Weaver and Mason share a look. “We hit that a little while ago and found a spawning site, which we napalmed. Are they all spawning sites?”

“We do not know.”

“What about these?” Mason points to the black clouds hovering over Fayetteville and DC on Cochise’s murky blue map.

Cochise points to the Fayetteville site, saying, “This one is likely skitter infantry, spawning and supply, or a place where they are keeping human children.”

He then points to DC. “This one is larger. It may be a central supply drop point due to its location on the coast, or the Espheni queen may be there. We cannot prove or disprove that.”

“What does it take to kill the queen?” Mason asks immediately.

“She’s just like any other Espheni. Shoot her, stab her, or burn her. She will be guarded. It will not be easy.”

Mason nods, “We should take a look-”

The hope is too big to speak. This could be over. It could be over soon.

John looks at the map and sees the distance and the rivers that they’ll probably have to go around. “If you haven’t noticed, it’s getting cooler and it’s gonna take you a month to walk there. We don’t have supplies for a winter _here_ , much less for a month of walking followed by combat. Because that’s what your ‘look’ will turn into.”

"The opportunity to go after the queen is too good." Mason says. “There will be casualties for us to win this war.”

“I’m not disputing that. You know I’ll be there. I’m just asking how many people are you willing to bury beside the road to get there?”

And then Mason says, “It’s easier to travel with a smaller group.”

“I would like,” John says tightly, “to believe that you mean that you’d send a scouting party to have a look for you.”

Mason’s silence tells him everything.

John knows that he should just walk away. He should get his shit and leave, like he’d said to Sara. He should calm down. But Mason doesn’t starve with the rest of them. Mason doesn’t get hurt like the rest of them. Mason doesn’t lose people like the rest of them, Lexi notwithstanding. Mason is goddamn charmed, or something.

“You used to care about your people, Mason. You used to care about your family.”

“I do.” Mason says. “I protect them.”

“Winter is three months away. We have two weeks of food, and hunting will only get harder. Half of us are still living outside. People will die.”

“We have an opportunity to win, Pope. I can’t just not take it.”

“It’s not a win if there’s nobody left to build a civilization out of next spring. I’ll lead your damn scouting party, Mason, but the colony stays here.”

“What would you have me do? I can’t just- I can’t just magic up food!” Mason snaps.

John snaps back, “You’d have a better chance of it here rather than in a black zone!”

“There are other militias.” Cochise says, dropping it into the argument like a grenade.

“If the queen is real, us and the other militias could win this now. Then winter would be just that.”

“Okay.” John says. “I’m not going with you.” He backs down, walking away like he should have. Too little too late and he knows it.

“Coward.” Mason calls after him. “Deserter.”

John whips around. “The _fuck_ did you just call me?”

“You’re just saving your own skin again. You don’t give a shit about anybody else here. You haven’t changed one single bit from the piece of shit who told me to kill my kids. As a  _mercy_ .”

“And who got shot in the fucking leg getting them back for you? Which of us shot Ben and Maggie in the head? Who, Mason? Who? I’ve changed and so have you!”

“Every plan of yours has cost us lives and supplies. Maybe I know that better than you, because it’s always me and my people who take the hit for it.” John spits out names. “Dai, Kadar, Crazy Lee, Tector, Jimmy. Those were my people, they trusted me! And I trusted you, and you _were not worthy_. And where are they now? Corpses all up and down the coast, Mason! They’re all dead!”

“And there’s more, Mason, do you remember them? Because we do!” Mason is staring at him, mouth opening. Mason went for blood and John will hit back just as hard. “Remember Lourdes? Lexi killed her for disagreeing. Lyle died saving one of your boys from the corralling! Scotty was used as bait for that overlord! You celebrated that mission and _Willow didn’t even get his body back._ And now Ryan’s dead too. Where’s his body? Half eaten on the ground where you abandoned him?”

“I’ve lost people too! My wife and daughter-!” Tom shouts at him.

“That doesn’t make you special! We’ve all lost people.”

“What do you want from me, Pope?”

“Give a shit, do better.” John snaps back.

“How can I  _do better_ when you’re constantly tearing me down and going behind my back? Your constant negativity-!”

“Everything I’ve done has helped us all out or protected us from your mistakes! Every hoarded good, every salvaged weapon, every time I’ve suggested a different tactic. And every time I’ve given it over to you, we’ve ended up a little closer to having nothing at all!”

“Do you think it’s all my fault? Do you think that I should die, is that it? That it’ll make me even with everyone else?” Mason snarls, drawing his pistol and pointing it at John’s head. 

Weaver says, “Tom-”

“Shut up.” Mason snarls.

John steps to it, closing the gap so that Tom couldn’t miss if he tried.

“Whatchya gonna do, kill me too? It might be good for you to have the blood on your hands.”

The cold muzzle grazes his forehead and John knows that this is not what either of them want, not what Tom pulled him out of that ruined theater for. “I trusted you.” Then he grins. “No more dissent, huh?”

Tom flips the pistol around, pointing it at himself. “Be the leader.”

John reaches up, wrapping his hands around the grip and over Tom’s. It’s warm, warm from being under his coat against his body, Tom’s hands are warm through his tattered gloves and the sensation is the only thing tethering him to his body. He’s angry, he’s too angry, he can feel every molecule in the knurled grip of Tom’s pistol cutting into his hand.

“No.” He says, thumbing the safety back on. “No, that’s not the idea.”

He steps back, letting his hands fall empty and useless to his sides. “No. The idea is that you consider the cost of your schemes. That you think about the bodies in your trail. That you think about the damage to the survivors. That you ask and then listen to the rest of us when you decide what you’re doing. You can’t build a civilization on betrayal or corpses.”

He turns away from Tom, and he almost expects a shot. Almost disappointed that Tom doesn’t put him down right there for this last betrayal.

“Go! Get the fuck out of here, Pope!” Tom shouts at his back. “Take your bitterness and leave.”

John lifts his hand in a wave, walking away.

John stands before his and Sara’s squat, surveying it. He’d built a place to stay and gather out of the ruin. They’d stayed here with the colony longer than they ever meant to, opportunities to leave come and gone. He could have left; none of this had to happen this way. He shakes his head and goes inside, cursing his need to reconstruct, to make every place that he lays his head twice a home.

When will he learn that that’s not for him?

He gathers up all of his things into a pile on the table and starts carefully packing his bag, trying to work the hollow tremor out of his body. There’s footsteps behind him, he’s only halfway through, he doesn’t want to know. He turns, hand resting on his holster.

Sara is leaning in the doorway, arms crossed. "So I heard that you got banished."

“Go away.”

“No.” She stands up out of the doorway and approaches him. “Where are you going?”

He shrugs. “Your house to close it up proper for you, and then maybe further west.”

“Why are you acting like I’m not coming with you?”

“You still have a place here. I don’t.” He haphazardly wedges the last few things into his pack, desperate to be done.

“I guess you didn’t hear. Mason told everyone who agrees with you to get out too,” Sara says softly. “You’re leading the mutiny.”

He shoves his backpack with unnecessary force. “Just what I fucking wanted.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” She lays a hand on his shoulder.

He shrugs it off, irritable. “I’m leaving tonight.”

“He gave you until sunrise.”

“He’s not gonna change his mind overnight. He’s right; I’m a troublemaker and they’re better off without me.” He sighs. “And I’m not gonna either. Might as well leave while the getting’s good.”

“John.” Sara says flatly. “Look at me.”

He looks over at her, she’s just a breath away. He can’t handle this.

“He doesn’t know how much he needs you.” Sara shakes her head. “I’m coming with you. I have a life outside of here, and you’re welcome in it. The rest of them-” Sara scrunches her face up. “Guess we’ll figure that out if anyone else follows us.”

“Right.” He doesn’t want to think about it. “I’m leaving now.”

“I think I need to talk to Carly before we go.” Sara says firmly. “Wait for me.”

At the door she turns and says, “Can you get my stuff together?”

“No.” 

Sara gives him a  _look_ before disappearing.

He stares after her, feeling hollow and weak and burned at the edges. He slowly crumples down onto the floor, head in his hands, elbows on his knees.

He’s messed it all up again. No going back now, no favor that he can buy. Going like a coward into the woods. Mason is right sometimes.

“ _Fuck_ .”

He scrubs his hands over his face. Nothing left but to do it.

_Can you get my stuff together?_

He can do that. Make one thing right.

Slowly, he begins to gather her stuff onto the table. Like he’d gathered his but with less haste and more care. The ache is settling in.

On his second trip down, Weaver is waiting for him by the table. An ambush. “The hell do you want?”

“I don’t want you to go.” Weaver struggles with the words.

“You and me both, man. But here I am, going.”

“It’s just me- against.” Weaver trails off.

Weaver has been rescuing Mason’s plans to the best of his ability even longer than John has. John’s been the rock in Mason’s path that Weaver uses to change Mason’s course. It’s been- a partnership, of sorts.

“I know. I’m sorry.” He really is. Things had gotten weird while he was dead, and that’s not the most of it.

“Mason’s going to DC now to take on the queen. He’s decided that. We’re gonna go up 95 and 301 depending on which has more resources along the way. Leaving the day after tomorrow.”

“Thanks.” He says. “Good luck. Really, I’m rooting for you. Don’t let him too far off the leash and you can pull this off.”

“Heh.” Weaver sighs. “Yeah. Be seeing you.”

“Yeah, you too.”

Weaver abruptly turns and walks out.

John watches him go.  _Be seeing you_ . Like they’ll still be in the same town after this. How likely is it that they’ll both survive this? Another battle, another winter, they’re both tired and Weaver is weary.

John turns back to Sara’s things, folding her clothing and sorting weaponry. They could do with some more ammunition. He’s about to go filch some because he’s probably cut off from supplies now, too, but Dingaan’s lurking in the doorway. Can he just fucking leave already, sneak off like he usually does?

“John.” Dingaan says in the serious way that he speaks. “I am sorry that we did not have the opportunity to catch up more after your miraculous return, and that you are leaving us again so soon.”

“Come in.” John allows. Dingaan is the kind of person that the colony really needs. Kind and loyal and with the infrastructure knowledge to get them started again after this is all over.

“I have something for you.” Dingaan places a small hand cranked radio on the table beside John’s pack, and then a short whip antenna. It must have been part of the haul from the earlier raid.

“All this for a guy who’s gonna disappear into the woods and never come back?”

“You do not ‘disappear’. You are always up to something.” Dingaan smiles, a rarity. “Mid-afternoon. I’ll be listening.”

“Yeah.” John says. “Okay. No promises though.”

Dingaan nods. “I know. Keep in touch, John.”

“Okay.” He says again. He’s run out of words. Out of make-nice.

Dingaan waves and walks out.

He’s got everything of Sara’s lined up by the time she returns, he’s even shook the dirt out of her pack.

“Oh,” she says with a smile, “thank you.”

She pours a pocketful of rounds out of her jacked onto the table as she speaks. “I talked to Carly and Diane. The sunrise get out only applies to _you_ and everybody else is still deciding if they’re leaving or not. I’ve asked them to not follow until tomorrow.”

“Jesus. Don’t do that, it’s dangerous.” He says about the loose rounds.

Sara ignores him. “I want you to myself tonight.”

He pauses from refilling the clips for his revolver and rifle to look at her. She’s got an intensity about her.

“Yeah?” He offers a slight smile. It feels fake, it feels hopeful.

“Real house, real privacy, real bed. It’s gonna be real fucking romantic.” Sara smirks. “I’m gonna fuck you until you can’t mope about this anymore.”

The swerve into Sara being horny pulls him out of his spiral. He chuckles, “I got a lot of mope, sure you can handle all of it?”

“I’m pretty damn sure. C’mon, let’s get outta here.”

He shoulders his pack, slinging his rifle as she does the same. “Lead on.”


	8. Chapter 7: Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Men Get Pegged

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I say that my porn grew a plot.... the reason I wrote this whole thing.... reduced to one chapter....

They’ve woken Sara’s house up and built a fire outside to cook with and then light the evening with and unpacked as much as there was to unpack. There’s ammunition and food on the table, their boots lined up beside the door. All the trappings of a household. John feels oddly light.

There’s a moment of  _what next_ , the precipitous feeling of potential amplified by the flicker of the fire he’s sitting beside. He’s in Sara’s arms, reclining half across her. It’s so peaceful, but the standoff between him and Mason is still echoing inside him. All of the words, the mistakes.

He speaks into Sara’s upper arm. “I don’t want to think. I don’t want to feel anything but you.”

She tucks the hand that’s already on his chest inside his shirt. “Say it.”

“What?”

She squeezes his tit. “Say that you want me to fuck you.”

“Oh.” He feels himself blush. “Fuck me.”

She kisses the side of his face with approval. “Go wash up.”

“I don’t want to-” be away from you- “move.” He knows it’s coming as soon as the words leave his mouth; she pinches his nipple and he squeaks, he can’t help it.

She pats him like she’s sending off a horse. “Gerroff me.”

John pries himself up to his feet. All the places of his body that had been touching her feel the loss now. He wiggles his butt at her as he walks up into the house.

The water in the cistern on the roof keeps the heat of the day and barely cools in the night. He wishes that it would pick a temperature, be hot or cold, anything but this tacky lukewarm. Nevertheless he scrubs himself down and sticks a finger up his butt trying to wash himself out and the whole time his mind is elsewhere. The future, or maybe the past. Somehow the last two years of his life have been leading up to this, and he has so much less urgency fueled confusion now than he did when Julian was leaning on him. He wants it, yes, and he wants to please Sara too.

He wrings the water out of his hair and wraps a towel around his hips before going over to her bedroom and letting himself in.

Sara is sitting on the bed, glancing up at him with a smile as he shuts the door behind him. It’s a mirror of his first time presenting himself to her except this time he belongs here. There’s no question of it. Everything else may be in flux but this is not. He places the candle on the bedside table beside hers, and sits in front of her on the bed.

There’s an array of sex toys in almost as many colors as there are toys between them. Sara reaches across the small gap to run her hands up the bare insides of his legs. He captures her hands, she squeezes his legs before pulling back to wave at the array. “I know you haven’t seen all of them before, so here they are. This one’s for you.”

She’s pointing to a smooth blue one. John picks it up to inspect it. It’s so sleek.

After a moment she pushes his hand down so that she can lean in and kiss him. “Well?”

“I’m thinking about you fucking yourself with all of them,” he admits. He wants to watch. “And you fucking me with this one.”

“Yeah? Tell me about it.”

“I don’t know, I want to know.” He says, frustrated. He can’t tell her fragments of a fantasy, all noncontinuous. He can’t tell her about him on his knees with his mouth around Julian’s red cock. He can’t repeat her fantasies back to her. “However you want me. I want that. Like you’ve- I trust you.”

“Hey, okay,” She draws him in with fingers under his chin to kiss him some more. He puts himself into it, trying to turn them both on, leaning into her with his hands on her legs.

Sara breaks them apart, breathing heavy. “However, I want, huh? That’s a bold offer.”

He pushes the array of toys out of his way so that he can scooch closer to her. Having done so, he wraps his hands around her ribs, picking her up like the longest cat until she helps him by scrambling into his lap. Now he can stick his face into her neck and kiss her collarbones and follow the straps of her tank top and bra with his lips and fingers.

She eventually pulls him away, leaving her arms over his shoulder and her hands in his hair anyway. “Yer really cute.”

He smushes his face into her cleavage.

“I know you want it from how you put your ass out when I talk about bending you over, but I wanna hear you say it again.”

He blows a raspberry onto her and she laughs. “That’s not a real answer.”

“I want you to fuck me. I want to see you when you’re fucking me.” He’s hot all the way from his tongue to the tip of his cock.

“Oh,” She says, pleased by that. “I’ll put you on top so you can control how much you’re taking.”

“On my back-” he squeezes her butt with both hands, making her squirm in his grasp. “I don’t wanna squish you.”

Sara laughs, scooting backwards out of his lap. “Okay, I’m gonna put my strap on and then we’re gonna go back to necking while I finger you so you don’t get freaked out by the way it feels.”

“I’m not gonna freak out.” He’s been thinking about this for so long, it might be something else. “You should get undressed.”

Sara pulls her tank top off, stretching and pushing her chest out as she does so. He moves in, kissing further down into the curves of her breasts until she pushes him back. He tugs at her jeans instead, annoying until she unbuttons them and gets them down from around her hips. She takes her undies and bra off and begins sorting out the straps of her harness. “I like this more now, I think. No need to be anybody but me.”

“Yeah?” John offers, but she doesn’t expand on the thought.

“I miss my old harness.” She says plaintively. “It was way nicer than this one.”

He reaches out to her, sliding his thumb through the steel ring and her bush and curling his fingers under her pussy. She sighs, sinking slightly into his hand for him to rub her gently, thoroughly distracting them both for a little while.

“Hey,” Sara puts her hand in the middle of his chest. “I’m supposed to be doing that to you.”

She whines when he slips his hand free anyway.

Sara pulls the blue dildo through the ring and finishes adjusting the harness to hold it snugly against her. Hers goes out, his wants to go up. He slides his hand along it, cool silicon in his palm and then along his arm as he cups her pussy again. She wiggles happily.

“Hey, let’s go. Get on your back.”

He rolls onto his back with his knees up. She kneels in between his legs with her knees bracketing his ass and her strap pressing against the corner of his leg, right next to his dick. He teases at it, himself, running a finger along it and the sensitive skin underneath at the same time.

She bends over him, kissing at his chest and his hands go to her hair and breasts. She has him writhing under her pretty quickly.

She swipes two fingers through the tin of lube before pressing them to his hole. She just rubs gently and he can’t reach her and he wants to so he squeezes her shoulder with his knees.

“Relax,” she says, “think about letting me in.”

He does, spiritually willing her on every press to enter him, even just a little bit until his eyes have closed and it’s the only thing that he’s thinking.

“Oh, yeah, you’re ready.” Her hand leaves him and he pries his eyes open enough to watch her lube her strap. It’s the hottest fucking thing-

She wipes her hand off on a towel before bundling it up. “Here, lift your hips.”

She shoves the rolled up towel under his hips. She shifts now, pressing the tip of her strap against his hole. Just pressing. She thrusts slightly, not entering him, just stretching him a little more each time. It feels huge, he loathes it when she slips back, it’s _infuriating._ And then she says, “That’s the tip.”

“Oh,” he pants. 

She holds her thumb up. “Just this much.”

“ _Oh_ . Please, more?”

“Yeah?” She mock inquires. 

It’s such a strange sensation, being able to feel it moving inside him.

“Tell me if it’s too much.”

He nods. “I mean-”

She laughs. He’s lifted his legs to let her press her hips flat against his butt.

“I guess not.” She remarks, amused. “That’s really good, you’re doing really good.”

He wiggles desperately, needing to feel it inside him.

“Yeah?” She teases.

He puts his hands on hers where she’s holding his hips. “Fuck me, that’s good.”

Her eyes widen, “Fuck, yeah, okay.”

She still moves slowly, drawing out and applying more lube before she sinks back in. Slowly and he can feel his body adapting, they’re working together so that she can speed up.

He lifts his legs higher, she hooks them over her shoulders, he crosses his ankles behind her head. Her first thrust jolts him.

“Too deep?”

“Easier on the next one-”

She takes it slower but he still twitches again. There’s an expanding _need_ inside him, like he’s been edging himself but it’s not in his cock, it’s diffusing throughout. “Don’t stop-”

She smiles and keeps going. Just a little gentler but giving the need exactly what it wants is only increasing it in waves. He clutches at her arms, “fucking that’s what it feels like-”

She’s grinning and panting and beautiful. He’s glad it’s her, that it’s her for his first time.

“Good, innit?”

John can’t reply, he’s feeling too much to make words. Waves piling up inside him, he’s gonna explode, maybe literally. “I think I’m gonna come-”

“Not sure?”

“-feels so different.”

“You may,” Sara allows, and he wasn’t asking permission until she allowed it. “Let it happen.”

“I don’t know.”

She lifts a hand, dragging one of his with it, and puts it on his cock. He’s so hard, it’s unbelievable. She leaves his hand there and goes back to fucking him. He lets her thrusts slide his fingers over his cock. It’s such a light touch and then it’s enough and he’s coming all over himself.

Sara fucks him through it, each jolt prolonging it until he begs her to stop.

She pulls out of him, created intensity overwhelming and then pleasant ache- she disappears for a moment and he unfolds himself, stretching out into a pleased haze, thinking absolutely nothing.

Sara returns and lies beside him, tucking himself under his arm. He lets her, curling his fingers over her pussy as she settles. He dips one finger into her and she’s liquid heat and so so soft. Disbelief tinges his voice, “Fuck, you’re wet.”

She moans against his arm as he slides his finger between her folds. Up to her clit, stiff against the pad of his finger and back down, dipping into her a little more each time.

She’s moaning and clutching at his arm. He can’t finger fuck her like this, she’s thrusting against his hand as he slides, still just that one finger.

“Wish I could fuck you like this.” There’s no way he could get it up again and he knows his fingers aren’t gonna be enough for her, at least not like this.

She crosses her legs tightly, he can feel her throbbing but she’s got his hand pinned still. “You could.”

He tries to slip a finger further into her, she clings to his arm. “Yeah?”

“One of my toys.”

“Which- which one?” He doesn’t want to move yet but he wants to please her more.

“The wavy one-” Sara struggles briefly before sliding out from underneath his arm only to discover that because he didn’t move, all of his cum is still on him. “Aw, gross.”

“You did it.” He teases.

She pulls the mushed towel out from under him, dropping it on him before finding the toy she wants. It’s slender, total width not more than his cock but it’s shaped in parallel waves.

“Roll over, you big lump.”

He finishes drying himself off in time to pretty much end up face down in her lap when he rolls over. She’s sitting up against the headboard with him between her legs. She spreads them for him to lick and kiss at her, he slides a finger into her too and she swears and grabs his head.

He sinks his finger into her to the knuckles, other knuckles pushing against her labia and it’s almost effortless with how wet she is. He puts his arm into it a little and she _yells_ and then in a much more normal volume, pants, “Use the toy.”

He picks it up. The head of it has a weird shape from the first wave putting a sort of notch into it. He flicks his tongue through the notch and then around the head.

“ _Fucker_ .”

He smirks at her. She digs a heel into his back. He slips the head of the toy between her labia, sliding like his finger did, down until it dips into her hole and then he presses it in.

It moves uncertainly. Not sticking, but the waves making the motion unsmooth.

She slides down a little to provide better access. “You wanted to fuck me, _fuck me.”_

He pulls it almost all the way out and it’s moving smoothly now. Thrusts it back in. She moans loudly.

He fucks her with it like he was fingerfucking her. She falls to pieces almost too quickly. He mixes a slow thrust in occasionally, just to let her feel each bump on the toy and each time she swears incoherently and yelping when he returns to fuck speed.

This time she comes on the first thrust after and the strength of her orgasm jerks the toy in his hand. He holds it for her until she’s done, until she’s soft and lax and breathing slowing before letting it slide out of her.

She looks down at him sleepily. “I know I need a shower but-”

He looks at her and the sheen of sweat on her chest and she looks delicious. “Dry off, we’ll shower tomorrow.”

She makes a pleased sleepy sound. She makes a much less pleased sound when he pushes the towel at her. She slides down until she can lay and he can wrap her up with his body.

He murmurs into the back of her neck, “Thank you.”

She reaches back to pet at him. “Hey. My pleasure.”

They wake up together. Birds are shrieking at the rising sun outside. He rolls over to spoon Sara properly. “How are you feeling?”

“I should be asking you that.” She snugs herself back against him.

He kisses her shoulder. “Sore, but good. Really good.”

“That’s good. If we do that often enough, you’ll stop feeling so sore.”

“Do you want that?” He’s not sure he’s prepared to give her that, but he would.

“We’ll mix it up sometimes.”

“Good. You feel so damn good.”

“I sure as fuck do!”

He laughs.

“I wanna shower. You should make breakfast.”

“Yeah?” He nips her shoulder gently.

“Mhm. You can warm me up after.”

“ _Oh_ , can I?”

He can feel her smirk through the way she wriggles. “We got privacy for now, and I’ll have my man any way I want.”

John thinks about how loud she made him the night before instead of how he feels about  _my man_ and slides a hand over her hip and between her legs.

She promptly removes his hand. “Nope, shower first.”

He laughs, patting her flank. “Get going, I wanna eat you out.”

She languidly stretches back against him with a groan. “Yeah, kay.”


	9. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the bitch is back & shit gets weird

He makes breakfast. It could be normal; life could be like this. Hope, or complacency? But it won’t last. Other defectors are coming today and even if they don’t, the Espheni are still out there. It’s nice to leave, but is it really in his nature to stay gone?

They don’t have the food stores here to support a group. It’s too late in the year to start a farm. They’ll have to become a raiding party and that brings risks with it. It puts him in Mason’s shoes.

Be the leader.

Goddammit. He leans there for a moment, stretching his wrists on the edge of the counter.

Is it selfish, really, to want to stay alone? Especially here where he can shower more than never?

He hears Sara’s footsteps on the stairs and he straightens up. She’s got her overshirt pulled tightly around her shoulders- the cistern must have cooled overnight. He opens his arms and she bumps in against him for a hug, still clutching her overshirt tightly.

Life settles down to somewhat of a rhythm after a few days. Most of the other defectors arrive in the afternoon of the first day and three more arrive on the second day. Sara’s house can’t hold all of them and there’s tents growing up in the lee of the house; people long practiced at relocating. For now the rules of hospitality hold and nobody begrudges her and John for keeping one of the larger bedrooms to themselves yet.

Yet. John looks at the cluster of tents and sees the cold months coming. They’d left in the name of everyone getting a fair share, and this isn’t fair. They’ll have to build, or they’ll have to relocate. There’s only two options.

He’s floated a couple of ideas to the group. There’s an addition on Sara’s house- it was built later than the main body of the house and has suffered more from the abuse of the seasons. It’s dangerous to be in and it’s dangerous to the integrity of the rest of the house. He’s suggested pulling it down and using any good materials that they can pull from it to rebuild the addition. One story in the lee of the bigger house, a cluster of rooms around a central fireplace to heat them. They can probably build it before they freeze. Or they look for a place where they can stay together easily- and leave the only secure food supply they have behind and untended.

There’s no good solution to it. Sara has the surrounding area pretty well mapped for resources, but this house was deep down a country road before the invasion and everything nearby she’s already scavenged. So they’ve decided to send out groups to see if the suburbs have anything, to see if the CSA farm they found in the phone book has anything. Weighing their options while John tries to figure out how to make the building work for them all.

So, something like normal.

And then Lexi shows up one evening like she hadn’t died up on the moon with him.

Perhaps the thing that perturbs him most is how normal she's acting. Just walked into the encampment at Sara’s house from out of the woods, asking for Tom Mason like that's normal. She doesn't even have a backpack. The straight white hair is unmistakable, though.

"He's gone north,” John tells her.

Lexi smiles, "Finally got yourself kicked out, huh?"

Carly interjects, "We left."

"I got kicked out. Everyone else decided to leave." John amends.

"Where's Sara that I heard so much about?"

"Hi." Sara says from across the cooking fire where she's turning corn in the coals. She waves the tongs in greeting.

"You're as cute as he said." Lexi says.

John snarls at Lexi. Sara narrows her eyes. "Go play with someone your own age."

"I'm…" Lexi pauses, counting on her fingers. "About 35 in human years."

"And you're still 6, mentally." John mutters coldly, just loudly enough for her to hear. "Maybe you should go find your daddy up north."

"Think I'll stick around for a little bit. I've been out in the woods alone for too long." Lexi cheerfully fires back.

John looks around the fire. He sees ambivalence and hidden distrust, but nobody's saying anything in front of the telekinetic magic alien girl. "Fair enough, you can stay the night. We'll get you on your way tomorrow."

His people relax; looks like he made the right call.

"Aw, don't you miss me?"

"Less than you could ever imagine." He says quietly, mostly to himself. He's got a question for her but not one that he can ask with all the people around. What happened to him while he was dead is too fantastical and horrid to be believed; even he thinks it's a dream sometimes except for the four circular scars, two on his chest and two on his back from being stabbed through with needles. So Sara knows some details, and nobody else does. But he has to know: where did she go when she died? How long was she dead?  _What happened?_

Sara and Eric start passing around the corn and everyone settles in to eat, even Lexi, and slowly everything returns to normal. Conversation flows, although it mostly flows around Lexi without touching her. John just waits, watching.

He gathers up the cobs and takes them out away from camp to bury. Lexi follows him of her own accord; he sees distrust on Sara's face.

Beyond the edge of the firelight but before the treeline, he stops and turns to her, "Did you die?"

Lexi seems surprised. "Yes, I-"

"Did you go somewhere while you were dead?"

She hesitates, "Y-yes."

"Where did you go?"

"I-" Lexi looks at him suspiciously. "I was briefly in an Espheni warship, and then I woke up here."

John sighs. "Espheni, huh."

"They must have wanted to to see their chosen one again." She says brightly.

A bark of a laugh escapes John. "How do I know that you're not working for them?"

Lexi shrugs. "Nothing I say will convince you."

"You almost had me last time." John allows, drawing her out. Towards the end, they'd had to work together to steer the ship and it had almost  _almost_ worked.

"Did I?" Lexi seems surprised and his suspicion grows.

"We were getting along pretty good, believe it or not." John half smiles, encouraging her. "What's the last thing that you remember?"

"The explosion-"

"No, before that."

"John, I hit my head!" Lexi complains.

He acquiesces. "Fine, come on, let's go back to camp."

The thought that the Lexi currently rolled up in a sleeping bag on the porch isn’t the real one, isn’t the one he died with, isn’t- fuck, what if he himself is a copy? It’s not impossible, he’s  _met_ his doppelganger. It’s bothering him, despite the scars on his body, despite Sara in his arms.

It makes him afraid in ways he can’t describe.

"I don't think this Lexi is the one that I went to space with." John murmurs into Sara's shoulder.

Sara rolls over to whisper even more quietly, "Then who is she? How do you know?"

"Dunno, but there's something off about her. She wasn't dead the same amount of time that I was, didn't go where I went."

"Thin evidence."

He shrugs, "It's not like I'm gonna drag her out back and execute her."

"Jesus." Sara says.

"Already tried that once and it didn't work, she's too powerful." John says flatly. “She caught the bullet in her hand.”

" _Jesus._ " Sara whispers in disbelief. 

"Gotta keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn't fuck with Mason’s head. After that, who knows."

"I didn't sign up to kill kids."

He realizes that Sara doesn’t know who or what the hell Lexi is, or what she’s done. "She's responsible for over half the deaths we've had so far, and indirectly responsible for a third more. She used Mason to betray us to the Espheni. I'm surprised that nobody attempted to run her out on sight."

"So we're just gonna keep an eye on her."

"Yep." John agrees bitterly. "Can't kill her, can't cage her, can't trust her; and if she gets in contact with Mason, he'll lose his head and jeopardize everything, _again_."

"This is insane." Sara shakes her head.

“I know darlin, I know.” He pauses, hit by a terrible realization. “Fuck, I’ll have to explain to everyone somehow that we’re babysitting her without her finding out.”

“I  _told_ you I didn’t want kids.” Sara mock complains.

“She’ll go away eventually. Just don’t know how yet.” John sighs.

“Tomorrow.” Sara says. “Shut up and sleep.”

He kisses her instead of saying anything, knowing that he’ll be awake in the dark.

The CSA is over twenty miles away. That’s a two day expedition, at least. But diligence in searching the phone book had turned up a family farm that’s only ten miles away. It’ll be a long day, but only one day so they go on an expedition there first.

They hear the farm before they see it. It sounds like chickens.

When they see it, it reminds John of the water mill he’d tried to get running back in Boston. Buildings old as dirt and badly neglected but still holding together on age alone. And chickens everywhere. So many goddamn chickens.

They’d shot a turkey last week but this? They’re the solution to an overpopulation problem. He almost laughs but there’s still the rest of the farm to look over. Better not get ahead of himself.

And then there’s a wild barking and a dog comes barreling around the corner of the barn at them. The party scatters, Sara is raising her rifle, he throws an arm out to stop her as the dog skids to a halt ten or fifteen feet away from them and hesitates, clearly unsure if it should try to run them off or let them in. The dog is in pretty rough shape: something had chewed on it pretty good and it looks like it had managed to recover on its own.

“It’s a guard dog, it’s been protecting the chickens. That’s why there’s so many and they’re all still here.” Isaiah slowly passes his pack over to his wife, Amanda. “Here boy, c’mere boy. Hey, hey, you’re just doing your job, you’re such a good dog, c’mere.”

The dog hesitates some more and John can’t really believe that the dog is caving to just a little praise after all this time. But it’s approaching Isaiah and sniffing the hand held out for it and Isaiah is giving it head rubs and it seems deliriously happy to have people around again.

John would give blessings on the memory and house of the people who’d trained the dog, but the rest of the farm is in about the same condition as the dog. It’s been badly chewed on by the weather and the age of the buildings. The house is rotting, worse than Sara’s, someone let the cows and horses out and they’re gone for good by now, and the only crops that really made it are the squash and sunflowers. The squash had gone wild and taken over half of the yard, easily.

God, they could really use a horse.

Oh, and the tractor shed is glowing from the inside.

That’s not suspicious at all.

They collectively avoid it since it doesn't seem to be actively harmful or threatening. This works until they’ve scoured the entire farm and only found more corn, some herbs, and a bulging row of potatoes. John’s of half a mind to just walk away from it and he knows that he’s not the only one, but he didn’t end up on Tom’s shit list by respecting the sanctity of alien technology.

He collects a few rocks, and a few very large earthworms that were hiding underneath the rocks. Everyone else has the good sense to stand as far away as possible as he throws first the rocks and then the earthworms at the side and door of the shed.

They all fall to the ground, and the worms disappear into the grass.

So it’s not an energy shield or whatever that nasty shit was that the Espheni used during the corralling that just cut people in half.

“Well!” He says brightly, “Probably not dangerous!”

He unlatches the door with a stick and steps in.

The first thing he sees is a green tractor. It’s about all he sees, because it’s one of those massive modern industrial farming ones. He edges around it and further back into the shed towards the source of the glow.

There’s at least two more tractors in the shed, each one progressively older the further back they go. God bless farmers and their tendency to hoard equipment. The second tractor has the glowing thing sitting on the hood of it.

It looks like a glass soda bottle filled with liquid light. It has three prongs on one end like it’s supposed to plug into something. John doesn’t really want to pick it up barehanded so he goes back outside.

Everyone’s waiting for him. He describes it before shrugging, “I’m gonna take it with us, unless anybody has any objections?”

Everyone kind of looks at each other. The dog gambools in a circle around them. “What if it’s a tracking device?”

“There’s nothing watching over it here.” He shrugs again. “If we start being followed, we ditch it and run like hell.”

Anthony shoulders his way forward. “What if we wrap it in foil? I think it’s fine to take if we can do that.”

They turn up foil and a small purse in the kitchen of the house but after Carly puts her foot through the floor up to her knee by accident, they decide it’s not worth further exploration and regroup outside.

John gets to do the honors, since he’s the only one crazy enough to touch it, wrapping it up like a gas station hotdog and stuffing it in the purse.

After that they harvest as many vegetables as they can carry and collect some eggs into their packs and start back to the main camp. The dog only barely chooses to stay and protect the chickens rather than go with Isaiah.

They unpack all of their finds onto the kitchen table upon their return, eager to show the people who remained behind what they’d found, even the alien glowing thing. Everyone clusters around and the eggs get as much excitement as the glowing thing, or maybe more because the glowing thing could bring problems. And very likely will.

Lexi seems fascinated by it and like she’s trying to not pay too much attention to it. John’s trying to seem like he’s not paying attention to her, what comes around etc.

“Hey Lexi,” Eric asks from across the table, “Do you know what that is?”

Lexi leans over the table to pick it up. John had unwrapped it a little so they could all see it but she slides it right out of the foil sheathe, barehanded. Everyone shuffles back a little, feeling the pressure of the glow. Lexi turns it over, inspecting it, then shrugs. “I’ve got no idea.”

“Could you wrap that back up?” Sara asks, a slight edge in her voice.

Lexi looks around at them, gauging something. Then she whirls and bolts for the door, glowing thing clutched in one hand and white hair flying out behind her. People scatter, John lunges after her and misses his grab.

There’s shouting, he doesn’t have time to listen to it. Lexi will run straight into the woods; she has the advantage there, and he’s praying that nobody will try to shoot her through him.

He chases her towards the woods, hoping for a damn miracle. She’s faster than him and once she hits the treeline, she’ll be gone. Smaller, faster, stronger, more nimble. She’s almost at the treeline, he drops his hand to his pistol trying to draw it while moving.

Lexi stumbles. Her fall is almost comedic in its grace and totality, the device flying out of her hand.

It’s better than he could have ever hoped for, but it’ll only buy him a second or two.

He lunges for it and sprints back towards the camp. The more people they can distract her with the easier it will be to play keep away and find a way of stopping her.

She tackles him and he stumbles. Nobody close enough to throw it to. His hands come down on the ground, the prongs scrape at his palm as he tries to keep a hold on it. It burns like it broke skin and then she hits him again. He lashes back with it like a weapon, not thinking, and the prongs gouge into her arm.

Lexi shrieks, an unholy hair raising sound, jerking away from him.

He scuttles back, sliding on his butt in his haste to get away from her.

She’s back on her feet, looming over him. He tries to roll away; the kick lands on his shoulder. It throws him flat to the ground and he’d try to protect himself or the thing but there’s too much pain.

There’s a gunshot and Lexi jerks, the center of the hand she’d tried to catch the bullet with is obliterated. She’s shouting and then it turns to choking and then she falls, remaining hand clawing at her throat and broken one pulling at her clothing and leaving black smears of her blood everywhere.

John keeps scooting away from her, crab-sideways with one arm useless. Her choking is her own damn problem.

She doesn’t get up.

They all wait, everyone except Sara knowing the full extent of her powers.

She doesn’t get up.

Sara goes over to her and feels her throat, looks into her her eyes. “She’s dead.”

Everyone sort of relaxes. John lets the device fall to the ground, opting to clutch at the shoulder she’d kicked. It feels sort of soft and the wave of pain just from touching it makes him pull his hand away. His hand hurts too, the scratches from the device didn’t hardly break skin but they’re swelling like he was stung by a bee.

Carly comes over and wraps the thing back up in the foil sheath and drops it back into the purse and authoritatively snaps it shut. “Guess that was important.”

John grimaces. “Great.”

“What do we do with- her?”

John looks around. Everyone’s looking at him, and he’s covered in dirt and slumping from the pain. “Burn the body. Bury the ashes. Leave nothing for the Espheni to recover.”

Anthony nods, seeing a task that he can organize. Sara points, “Not here. Out there, in the field.”

John mutters dourly, to himself. “She better not come back again. We’ve had enough damn resurrections around here.”

John sits by the side of Lexi's grave until she's just embers. No one had disagreed with him about burning her body but it's still hard to watch the flames. It's not the human thing to do, to burn the body, not when they'd burned the skitter corpses in piles outside the gates. But she was Espheni, wasn't she, right until the very end.

He nudges a bit of dirt into the pit they'd dug for her; the damp soil hisses on the hot ash and embers. He'll wait a little longer.

There'll be no marker for her. No wood or stone to say  _Alexis Glass-Mason, 2012-2014_ , for her. No bones to make archaeologists wonder how she grew so big in two years. Nothing to show that it was anaphylactic shock, not a bullet or a disease that killed her.

It had everyone feeling their mortality. Whatever was on or in the device had swollen John's hand up- it's going down already, thankfully- and it had killed Lexi. Closed her throat right up. They don't know if John is lucky, and they don't have the medicine to save anyone if they react like Lexi did. They don't have the medicine to save John's shoulder, either. Her kick had broken his collarbone in at least one place and dislocated the humerus from its socket and there's nothing that they can do other than push it back into place and splint it and pray that he still has function in 6-8 weeks.

He's goddamn useless with only one arm.

Sara approaches, the most visible part of her being the mug of burning sticks she's using as a torch to light her way. She stands beside him, one hand on his head as they watch the embers fade to dark.

"Come inside." She says eventually.

"Help me up."

Sara pulls him up. He stands there for a moment, wavering in the dark before pushing some more dirt in with his foot. Just enough to keep the ash down. Someone with two hands can use the shovel tomorrow.

"I saved all of them." He says quietly as they walk hand in hand back to the farmhouse. "Every single Mason. They all owe me their life. Except for her." He shakes his head. "Just the way it is, I suppose."

Sara squeezes his hand. "Are you gonna tell him?"

“Not until we’ve won. Anne deserves to know, but I can’t tell her and not Tom. She’s her daughter, after all.”

“How did-?” Sara hesitates.

“I don’t really know.” John shrugs, one sides. “Anne got captured early on and I guess she was already pregnant at that point. The Espheni had her for a long time, but not long enough for a full term pregnancy, you know? And then she just came back with Lexi in her arms.”

“She wasn’t the same. Whatever they did to her- she doesn’t wake up sobbing anymore, at least.”

“That’s fucked up.” The door into the house closes behind them and they go immediately to the stairs up to the second floor.

“Yeah. Lexi disappeared for a couple of months when she looked 8 and Anne lost her damn mind. She came back looking 20 and started an Espheni/human peace cult. Shortly after that she started killing people. That’s where the reeducation camps started, by the way, the Espheni saw how much some people wanted to believe in peace and started stealing and conditioning kids to believe that peace would only come through surrender.”

“What the  _fuck_ .” Sara breathes.

“Tom still tried to adopt her back from the Espheni after that.”

“That’s just fucking crazy.” Sara says, louder now that the door to her bedroom is shut behind them.

“Yep.”

“What happened to the kids?”

John slowly sits on the edge of the bed, his body one big ache. “Dunno. If they haven’t been killed yet, they’re still out there. Dunno what we’re gonna do with them when this is over. They’ll hate us.”

“That’s-” Sara stops. “I don’t know what to think about that.”

“I don’t know. We gotta get there first.” John shakes his head. He almost says _if we get there_ and then says instead, “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

Sara sighs. “Need help with your shirt?”

“I’m just gonna leave it.” He tries to switch to a flirtatious tone. “You could help me with my pants, though.”

She nudges him gently, amused. “Are you up for anything tonight?”

“Nah. I’m-” He trails off, not sure what he meant to say. Mostly he hurts.

“You’ll be fine. Let’s sleep.”

In a few moments, they curl up together and fall asleep.

“We want to move,” Anthony says, “to the farm.” He says it like he’s defying John, like he’s expecting John to feel insulted.

John stirs the embers with a stick, building them up. “Yeah,” he says, “okay.”

“Today, then?” Anthony asks.

“Sure.” He feels dull, restless from the pain in his shoulder and lack of sleep. “We’ll have to batten down the house for Sara before we go.”

“Sure.” Anthony agrees. “Say, are you okay?”

“My shoulder-” John starts, half of a whole lie.

Anthony nods. “You’ll heal.”

“Can’t wait.” If he’s brusque enough, maybe Anthony will leave him alone.

“I bet. Anyway- I’ll find some people for the house.” Anthony offers.

John nods, still idly messing with the embers. Being closer to the better farm and further away from Lexi’s specter is a good idea. They can reinforce one of the outbuildings, probably, the house is a goner at this point. Neither he nor Sara have a tent, maybe Sara does. He’ll have to make a side trip. Or maybe they can finally send an expedition to the CSA and see if it’s better.

The route is one they’ve already scouted and by the time they’re deep into the afternoon and over halfway to the farm, hopes are high that they won’t encounter anything awful.

“What’s that, up ahead?” Sara points, and the rest of them go on alert immediately.

There’s a gyre of vultures swirling up into the sky. They need thermals to fly like that; there’s probably an open space below them, or something very very interesting. Whatever it is, it’s been hidden by a bend in the road and the growth of the trees. It’s been an easy walk so far. Time for something exciting. John shifts his rifle off his shoulder and into his hands.

“Okay, spread out. Keep the spacing and call out what you see.”

They’ve practiced this. The spacing makes sure that one skitter can’t get all of them at once, and gives everyone a clear view on what they’re going into. It’s also the first time that they’ve done it for real. John’s just hoping they all hang together.

There’s something piled up on the edge of the road. It looks like dumped out laundry with sticks poking out, but with the dark rough look of roadkill. It’s got the limp ragdoll affect of a raccoon that’s been run over twice or a human that’s very very drunk, but it’s far far too big. There’s vultures perching on it, one screaming at them from what John is now tentatively identifying as a knee.

John calls out to halt and keep alert. He continues forward to investigate.

The vultures hiss at him as he gets closer. With their wings out, they’re almost as wide as he is tall and they’ve clearly been eating well off of the carcass. He has no interest on getting within striking distance, and the stench of decaying meat is keeping him well away.

The carcass doesn’t make any sense, and then he realizes that it’s an overlord. It’s all crumpled up but there’s no evidence of a fight. Like it had a heart attack and died. They could be so lucky.

He edges around it, staying outside of the vulture’s range, morbidly curious. It’s curled up on its side in a weirdly human defensive position. Its guts have been pulled out anyway, there’s bits out of its arms and legs too. Wolves or coyotes or dogs, who the hell knows these days. There’s thrash marks in the grass.

There’s brown marks of mammalian blood in the grass too and pawprints on the pavement. So there was a fight, but the overlord lost. It must not have had any skitters with it.

Weird.

He heads back to the group, which has clustered up a little but is still doing a good job keeping watch.

“It’s a super dead overlord, looks like it had some king of critical malfunction and then wolves or something finished it off. Weird but I think we’re good to relax and keep going.”

Sara takes a closer look as they move around it even as the rest of the group keeps their distance. From the vultures, or the smell, or death, he cannot tell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> canon whomst, do not think for even a moment that I looked up what the Device looks like. my house now.


	10. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John comes up with a scheme, and talks on the radio with Mason's group. There's something Strange afoot.

His broken shoulder has given John plenty of time to sit around and come up with hare-brained schemes since he’s not going on any of the raids or scouting missions that nearly everyone else is going on and if he sits still any longer Diane will figure out how to teach him to knit with only one hand. It’s not that he’s useless, it’s just that he can’t carry anything.

So pretty much useless. But he thinks that he might be able to get Sara on board with this idea. If it works out they’ll have a lot more range to explore in and be able to move, say, lumber, more easily for reconstruction projects. He heaves himself up and goes to find her.

Sara is staring at him like he’s gone fucking crazy. “Everyone could just get bicycles.”

“Well, yeah.” He agrees. “Bicycles _also_.”

She nods. “I’m going with you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Someone has to watch your ass.”

John snorts. “I’m sure you will.”

It’s gonna be a lot of walking.

It’s a lot of walking. His bound arm is throwing him off, he can’t walk as efficiently.

John steals two of the last three local maps from the first gas station they come across. The rest of it was ransacked long ago; it’s not even worth looking over. They move on, trying to make good time.

The bicycle shop that Sara had found in the phone book is a long ways away, but now they can mark their findings without taking the group map with them.

Not even twenty minutes up the road, there’s a turn for a dropped from space housing development. It’s so new that it’s not even on the map. “Here,” he says, “It’ll be in here.”

Sara unshoulders her rifle. “Try to stay where I can see you.”

“Yep.” John acknowledges. He opens his holster, praying as he does so that he doesn’t have to use his pistol.

The housing development is huge, branching off in all directions. It’s also been destroyed. It’s so bad that it’s hard to tell what tragedy befell first, but the story is the same everywhere. Looters with their guns and later, their rocks. Then animals, then a hurricane or two. Trees lay across buckled houses, overgrown yards are strewn with debris and rich spots in the greenery that would have bones in the middle if they cared to look.

John has done this enough times that he already knows. Some of those spots are never-buried humans, eaten by scavengers. Some are dogs with the same story.

There’s skitter exoskeletons too, piled up on the sides of the road between the remaining cars like they’d been parked there with them.

The cars have fared no better than the houses; some are crushed- John recognizes the telltale clawed-cross footprints of the mechs- and others have burned. The ones that escaped that have flat tires and broken windows. But that matters less, he’s looking for two things. A house with intact solar panels and any all electric car.

They might get lucky. Or they might find a skitter roosting in the rafters of a garage.

Up ahead there’s a motion. John calls out the location, Sara sees it too. It’s a dog, a Lab maybe, watching them suspiciously. It’s not approaching and it doesn’t look owned.

“As long as it leaves us alone, I’m cool.” Sara says quietly.

“Don’t like dogs?”

“Don’t trust ‘em. The people behind them are never good news and I’m not too excited to meet anyone who’s still hiding out here.”

“For sure.”

The dog’s gone though and they continue walking up the middle of the road. The roundabout centerpiece rises up ahead of them, the bendy metal pipe sculpture in the middle overgrown by the decorative shrubs and vines. As they get closer, he sees a sun bleached nylon rope hanging from one of the crossbars.

John knows better than to look, and he does anyway, vaulting up onto the low rock wall and looking behind it. There’s bones.

“A lynching.” He says.

“Great.” Sara says unhappily.

He hugs her, free arm sneaking around her waist. “They’re probably dead now.”

“Couldn’t have happened to a better bunch of people.”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

They skirt the roundabout and head down a side street.

The road they’re on runs parallel to the main road and will eventually connect them back onto it, heading in the right direction. Far enough down the road that John’s starting to get despondent, there’s a house with a closed garage. It’s not the first one with a closed garage, but there’s just something about it.

“I want into that one.”

Sara looks around. “Let’s go.”

They try the front door- locked. The side door is the same. They’ll go in through a window if they have to, most of them are broken. The back door is a sliding glass door, or was. Sara steps through the shattered pane, rifle first.

Nothing moves.

They’re in a vaguely defined area that’s both living room and kitchen. There’s a table and chairs. Everything is at least ankle deep in leaves and more in places.

“This floor better hold.” Sara whispers.

“Careful.” John whispers back.

The living room is clear. It’s been obliterated and animals have clearly been living here. But there’s pictures on the walls and a dead piano at one end. The piano still has a vase on it, fake flowers sunbleached and pale. And around it, pillar candles.

“Thank fuck for housewives.” John says, and shoves the least moldy one into his back pocket for later. They’ll collect the rest of them on their way out.

The house loops back around to the kitchen. Stairs up to the second floor, a step down to the garage. They go up. It’s clear, but there’s a hole in the roof that’s becoming a hole in the floor. Sara is about to head down but John stops to ransack the bathroom cabinet and then the hall closet, eventually turning up an unopened tube of toothpaste and a packet of toothbrushes.

“Jackpot.” He says, grinning. “Expires this year.”

Sara laughs as he tucks them into his bag.

They head back down to try the garage, the real reason for this incursion. The door is closed and locked but it’s meant to open from this side. John unlocks it, swinging it open for Sara to scan it with her rifle.

“Clear.”

He follows her in. It’s dim but the looks like there’s two cars, maybe, the one on this side is an older minivan. He sets his candle down on the hood, fishes out his lighter, and lights it. It crackles fitfully before catching. There’s children’s bikes, a lawn mower, a grill, the other car. It’s smaller- he moves towards it, Sara rounding the minivan from the other side. He can’t tell what it is from the front- he’s moving to her when she calls out, “It’s a Leaf!”

“Holy shit!” He rounds the back and sure enough it’s a Nissan Leaf. Not that he doubted her, but seeing it makes it real. “Oh _fuck yeah!_ "

He tries the door- it’s unlocked. It doesn’t blink any lights at him, no surprise. It’s been gone through, but there must have been nothing in it and whoever looted it hadn’t taken the time to break it. Sara finds the charger on the far side and it’s a cable unit, easy to bundle up and carry when they come back for the Leaf.

“This is perfect. All I need are the keys.”

They head back up into the house after making sure that there’s no obvious hidden keys in the garage. The table just inside the front door has been looted already, everything a mess on the floor. No keys. From the kitchen, Sara calls out, “They were on vacation!”

There’s a calendar still hanging by a magnet on the fridge and the dates make his soul ache. It’s been a long damn time. There’s a neat but faded ball point pen line bracketing the whole week- vacation. They never came back. Beside it, faded pictures of kids. Three, or maybe two at different ages. It’s hard to tell.

“Where did he keep his wallet? Or her purse, that’s where the keys they left behind will be.”

They eventually find the keys in the coat closet under the stairs in a little bowl on a little shelf. John almost pockets them before handing them to Sara. “Put them on your necklace.”

“Why?”

“Your cleavage is the safest place there is!”

“Oh  _my god_ . Put them on yours!”

“Everyone’s gonna wonder what I’m doing with car keys.”

“You gonna show up with the Leaf like a big damn hero?”

John looks away. “I don’t want anyone to know if I can’t pull this off.”

“Oh.” Sara holds her hand out for the keys. He drops them into her palm.

“Thank you.”

After that they start off once more for the bicycle shop.

John idly tunes around on the radio for a while, killing time. There’s garbled voices on the far side of intelligibility, ionosphere crickets, a single bar of music, even. There are people out there besides them, just slightly out of reach. He checks in on the band agreed on with Dingaan a few times, and then there he is at long last.

“-CQ Pope CQ CQ Pope this is Weaver-”

“Hey Weaver, long time no hear,” John breaks in, laconic tone a little forced. The last time they’d heard from anyone in Mason’s party was over two weeks ago.

“-Oh thank fu- Good, you’re there.”

“Where are you?”

“Norfolk. We found an active army base up here. They’re calling themselves the 14th Virginia.”

Behind him Eric mutters, “That doesn’t sound quite right.”

John nods in agreement before keying up in the break Weaver leaves him. “Are they on the up and up?”

“Yeah! They don’t seem to like Mason much but I’m trying to talk Marshall down on the side. They’re been looking for Espheni collaborators and they seem to think he’s one.”

Looks go around the porch on John’s side of the radio. Anthony shakes his head slowly. “Don’t like that.”

John keys up. “Guess who turned up here the other week.”

There’s crackly silence, Weaver keyed up but not saying anything. “-who?”

“Our favorite traitor.”

“Really. I thought she died up there with you.”

“I think she did.” John pauses, keeping the channel locked. “And I think it’s best if Mason keeps believing that.”

“I agree. The 14th wants to take the battle to DC. The queen is there, the Espheni queen is there.”

“Do they have a plan and a timeline?”

“Not yet. Hey, good to hear from you, I gotta go.”

“Yeah, talk to you soon.”

John lets the radio wind down. “Anyone else feeling a little suspicious?”

Nods go around.

John looks around the fire. They're still living rough but they look happier. They’ve had some time to rest even with the whole thing with Lexi. And he’s about to upend that by asking them to follow him back to Mason and into danger.

“So! That dead overlord we found? I think it was supervising Lexi and whatever about the device that killed her, killed it too. It didn’t look like it was murdered, more like it had a heart attack.” People are looking at him like they’re waiting for him to get to the point. “I think that whatever it is about the device that killed Lexi killed the overlord connected to her. Like, destroyed its mind.”

There’s a couple of nods. It’s not the craziest thing that’s happened to them.

“Weaver told us about the queen in DC. Stabbing her with it might kill her and every Espheni connected to her. Even if they don’t die outright, they won’t be able to communicate or coordinate forces when they’re brain dead.”

Anthony’s staring at him pretty intensely. “That would turn the war in our favor.”

Eric looks really interested, “We could finally win.”

Sara looks between them. “The overlord looked like it was finished off by the local coyotes. We might still have to kill all of the Espheni.”

Anthony speaks over Eric, “It’ll be easier when they’re brain dead.”

Carly speaks up, “What do you want to do with it?”

John shrugs his good shoulder. “That’s why I’m telling you. I think it should be brought to DC because it could be a significant advantage. Weaver said there was an offensive in the works- you all heard that. But I don’t think the situation there is stable. The idea that the 14th Virginia is looking for ‘collaborators’ and they’re targeting Mason- Ben and Maggie both are spiked.”

Carly nods. “If we’re going that far, I want a vote.”

“Absolutely,” Sara agrees. “John, tell them the other bit.”

“The one that makes me sound really fucking crazy?” John complains.

“Oh, well now you  _gotta_ ,” Eric teases.

John sighs. He doesn’t really want to talk about it. “Right. So I died. Lexi died up there with me. She’s strong but there’s no way she survived the explosion. I got sent to- do any of you remember when I was.” He shakes his head. “Do any of you remember Julian?”

“That guy you were fucking?”

“Thank you, Amanda.” It’s weird hearing someone else acknowledge that that even happened. “So it turns out that he wasn’t lying when he said he was from another world. Timeline. Whatever. I got sent to his world and it was a complete nightmare. I got stabbed by a robot and I should have died but I ended up in a ditch here.”

“Any _way_ , I was there for about a week and a half. Lexi said she was in an Espheni warship for a few days. I don’t think she’s the same Lexi that went to the moon with me.”

“How do we know that you’re the original John?” Sam asks. “Sorry, I just wanna know-”

“What would convince you?”

“Where were you stabbed?”

John pulls his shirt aside to show the circular scars around his heart. “I was stabbed through the chest with needles. It should have stopped my heart and maybe it did because I woke up here and this was tender but mostly healed, the same way I landed in that other world.”

Sam nods solemnly. Then he looks at Sara, “Did he have those before?”

Sara snorts. “Nope, but the bullet scar on his thigh is the same."

“Works for me. So you’re the real one and Lexi was, a clone?”

“Something like that, yeah.” John agrees.

“Okay.” Diana says uncertainly. “If the Espheni are creating clones that can nearly perfectly mimic the original, how do we know that anyone who isn’t here is the real one?”

“We don’t.” Eric says immediately.

“So we can’t even trust Weaver. Shit, how do we know that the offensive is even real?” Carly says.

“I don’t think we do.” Anthony says slowly.

“I don’t want to give the device to the Espheni.” Sam interjects.

John tries to bring the conversation back to the plot. “I don’t either. I don’t want to tell them that- I at least- am coming with the device at all. Not until we can prove that Weaver isn’t a clone.”

Sam nods. “DC is at least two weeks of travel from here, and we’re on the wrong side of the Potomac. I’m not sure that we have the supplies for that.”

“I’ve been working on a scheme-” there’s some good natured titters at that “-to use a solar panel to charge an electric car. Me’n Sara have already found a Nissan Leaf in good condition, I just need to find a solar house or something.”

“You? An electric car?” Sam teases.

“I make do in trying times.” John shrugs his good shoulder. “The gasoline is rotten. But I think I could get an electric vehicle back online. A single charge should go further than we can walk in a day, and as long as we plan the route to go through suburbia once a day we can probably find a solar panel and charge up. It’ll make it easier to carry enough supplies and all of our gear.”

“You’re not in any rush to leave then.” Sam asks.

John just gestures at his bound up arm. “I’d like to leave as soon as possible, but I haven’t found a place to charge the Leaf yet and I can’t carry anything by myself. Anyway, you all can decide among yourselves if you want to go on this adventure or nah.”

The conversation recedes like a wave then, people talking among themselves and food coming out of the cooking fire. John doesn’t want to split up- having this tribe situation is comforting, but he knows what he has to do and if he survives it he’ll come back like a cockroach.


	11. Chapter 10: road trip time!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> oh shit here we go

It’s been about two weeks since he proposed the plan. Nobody’s really counting but days pass and each one is full of the preparations for the coming winter- and John’s venture. Some of the preparations are the same: finding and preserving food. Some are different: Sara’s bicycle venture had worked out much quicker than John’s electric car scheme and three days later, everyone has a bike or trike, and a couple of them even have trailers.

Sam had found a house with solar panels and a self monitoring system that woke up after he dug it out from under the leaves only two days after John had proposed the plan, but mice had gotten into it and chewed on the internal wiring. It was reporting  _red_ , endless system faults no matter how many wires they replaced and it took another five days of persuading it that it could work without the grid hooked up to the house and pulling fuses out of the breaker box before it would let them fully enable the power system that it was hooked up to. Long enough for John to consider finding another solar house to try, or at least one that was less wildly unsafe to be in. After that, it took two whole days to push the dead Leaf to the power house before they could even start to charge it.

But  _then_ . With the Leaf charged and working- they can get a welder and put a hitch on the car for a trailer, and move lumber from stock-yards, and the trip to the CSA they’d never made it out to is inconsequential instead of a two day walk.

Things really are looking up, except for the venture to bring the battle to the Espheni. There’s too many unknowns. Will it even work? Is the queen real? Who else has been cloned? John wants to talk to Cochise about it but he can’t get Cochise on the regular radio; he needs Mason for that. They’ve all been going around and around on it, weighing options every night but at long last everything is as ready as it’s going to be and they can’t pretend any longer that at least some of them are going with him.

“Any last misgivings?” John asks generally. This is his project.

Isaiah nods, Amanda right beside him. “We’ve all put so much into this farm and I’m loathe to leave it.”

“Yeah, leaving it unprotected just doesn’t feel right. Who knows when we’ll be back?” Diane adds.

John nods. He agrees, “Anyone want to stay?”

There’s a couple of shrugs. Eric says, “I want to seem them again. I left friends behind.”

Maria leans over to Ana and they whisper in Spanish for a moment before Ana speaks up, “We’ll stay.”

Maria is good with a gun and not too squeamish and Ana has shown a knack for the plants and John is pretty sure that they’re in some kind of relationship but it’s none of his business. He nods, “Any objections to Ana and Maria staying and taking care of the farm?”

Zach looks like he’s about to object, but doesn’t and nobody else has any objections for which John grateful. He hadn’t wanted to have to pick someone to stay behind- although he is surprised that nearly everyone is coming on this venture. It’s far from having a certain outcome.

“That’s decided then. Ana, I’d leave you with the radio but we’ve only got one and I’d like to keep in contact with the 2nd.”

Ana waves her hand, dismissing the concern. “We’ll look for another.”

John nods, looking around at the group. “Anyone else?”

Nobody says anything.

“Then let’s pack up and go.”

They’ve made really good time, about 40 miles per day. It’s enabled by the bicycles, the Leaf, and stopping in the heat of the afternoon to charge the Leaf. And, at that rate, they don’t have to charge the car every day so it’s not a problem if they can’t find a place that they can fix up enough every day.

Nothing eventful really happens on the whole way there, other than a few increasingly cryptic messages from the 2nd on the radio. They respond like they’re still at the farm to give themselves the tactical advantage against whatever bullshit the 14th is playing at.

Because this wasn’t supposed to be a rescue mission, but it’s sure shaping up to it.

It doesn’t bear much thinking about, at least while they’re on the move because the idea of them, all 16 of them, taking an actual military encampment is a little too frightening. Doesn’t stop John from chewing at it to the point of nausea behind the wheel of the Leaf.

He almost wishes he was out there with them, walking even, wearing the soles off of his boots and his feet, and tiring himself out too much to think. Instead everyone else gets tired and he’s still got the physical energy, even after figuring out and fixing whatever’s broken in today’s solar panel house. Driving is too easy; he’s going crazy instead of sleeping. He hates being injured.

But driving is better, so so much better than having to haul all of their supplies on their backs. It let them cure meat in advance, and harvest potatoes and carrots and little onions to supplement any hunting they can do as they travel and the corn that they can pick off of the roadsides.

They’re almost to the base- they’re planning on stopping overnight when they find a good spot and on scouting the situation the next morning. But now there’s a figure trudging down the road ahead of them after twelve days of seeing no-one else. They’re gaining ground pretty rapidly because they’re on bicycles with all of their stuff piled on the trailer hitched to the Leaf and the figure is just walking.

Whoever, whatever it is doesn’t seem to notice them for far too long.

Anthony comes up beside the Volt- the window is already down so he just grabs the sill beside John’s arm and lets the car tow him. “Do we want to engage?”

“We’re gonna have to.”

“Flick the lights at him?”

It’s dusk with just enough light left to travel a bit more before they  _have_ to make camp. The high beams might catch the figure, or the trees beyond.

“Get everyone behind the car.”

It takes a moment to get their defensive formation set up. Anthony raps on the side of the car to say that they’re ready. John flicks the lights, click click click.

The figure jolts around, weapon in hand.

John slows the car, angling it before he stops to provide more cover for the group behind him.

“Identify yourself.” Anthony shouts.

The figure lowers the pistol. “Is that Anthony?”

“Weaver?” Anthony shouts back.

John shoves the car door open with his foot, standing up beside Anthony. “Oi, Weaver! The hell are you doing out here?”

Weaver’s almost to them now, pistol back in its holster. The group behind the car is relaxing somewhat.

“Oh, you know. It’s all fun and games until you gotta strangle an overlord. What are  _you all_ doing out here?”

“Oh, you know. Just thought we’d swing by to say hello since we were in the neighborhood.”

“Yeah, alright.” Weaver doesn’t sound convinced.

“Did you say an overlord? Where?” Carly asks.

“Back thattaway a little,” Weaver points in the direction that they’d come from. “In the ghetto, what did we fight about?”

“Other than everything? My hoard, which consisted of two cans of beans.” John narrows his eyes, trying to figure out the reason behind the question, then mentally shrugs. He'll play the game. “What’s the first food that I made for the colony?”

“Bread. Damn, we had it good then.” Weaver chuckles. “Okay, you’re not a clone and I’m not a clone.”

“How does that prove it?”

“They’re not very good at remembering stuff from a long time ago.”

“Hm. Well, I’ll take your word for it.” Well, maybe dying messed up Lexi’s clone’s memories more than usual because her memory of her death should have been only a month old at that point. He teases Weaver, “What’s up, you old coot? Give us the run down of what’s happened.”

“Man, I did _not_ miss you,” Weaver mock gripes. “Can I ride in the car, the overlord fucked me up pretty good.”

“Yeah, sure, let’s keep moving.”

Weaver drops into the passenger seat with a groan. “Nice car, where are you getting the fuel?”

“It’s electric. We charge it in the afternoons off of solar panels.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

Anthony and Carly throw their bikes up onto the trailer and claim the back seats, clearly not fully trusting that Weaver is the real Weaver yet.

The convoy moves out with Weaver guiding them on where to go. It’s a little haphazard- he’d gone overland when he’d gone after the overlord, so Anthony ends up with the map out trying to figure out the roads from insufficient information.

“Right, so, what happened. Jeez. We were radioing out pretty regular to find other militias and got a couple of responses as we went up the coast. I got shot in the arm. Uuh, we lost the Camaro four days out, the truck quit two days after that. A little bit after that, the 14th sent a scout down to us and told us to shut up on the radio because we were attracting ‘attention’. We followed them up to Norfolk because they’d be good reinforcements to Mason’s plan. Couldn’t pass that up.” Weaver sighs deeply. “That turned out to be a fucking trap. The 14th took poorly to Ben and Maggie’s spikes, and even worse to Cochise. Something about us all being Espheni collaborators. So Cochise took off and Marshall tried to execute the lot of us for treason. She turned out to be an Espheni controlled clone, which is how I come to be out here strangling an overlord.”

John takes a moment to digest that. “Well, that’s a hell of a story.”

Weaver sighs. “So how have you all been? You seem to be doing well for yourselves.”

“Hah.” John tries to organize his thoughts after that onslaught. “We were about settled down at Sara’s place, resources established, you know, and who but Lexi shows up. We don’t exactly welcome her with open arms as you might guess, but I realize that we have to keep her the hell away from Mason for you all to have a chance. I talk to her, and she spent her dead time on an Espheni warship and it’s not the same amount of time that _I_ was dead. The next day we found some mystery alien tech and she tried to steal it. I ended up stabbing her with it. She died a couple of minutes later from asphyxiation, and it fucked up my hand where I got scratched. We decided to move to a better farm and on the way found an already dead overlord. Looked like it had had a heart attack or something. Talked to you on the radio, now here we are. Tada.”

“So what happened to your shoulder?”

“Our favorite Mason progeny kicked me while I was down. Dislocated it and broke my collarbone in at least one place.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, it sucks. So what’s the situation that we’re gonna be walking into here?”

“I’ve got no damn idea. Things were pretty chaotic when I took off to deal with the overlord problem. I hope Marshall’s still alive because Wolf isn’t ready to lead the 14th and I’m not in their command chain.”

“How’d you know that Marshall was a clone? Why do you still want her alive?”

“-I used to know her back in the day.” Weaver says shortly.

“Right.” The way Weaver answered that makes John a little curious about the nature of their relationship.

“If anyone’s in charge right now, it’s probably Mason pulling a rager about the execution business. There’s a couple of militias coming in soon, 4th Maine and some gang out of Tennessee.”

“So we’re actually gonna do it, huh?”

“Yeah. We’re gonna try since we’ve got all the people.” Weaver seems wistful. “What’s the alien tech?”

“I want Cochise to look at it when he comes back before I get anybody's hopes up.”

“That’s fair.” Weaver groans, just as a general comment.


	12. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John & Co. show up to the party. Everyone is having a very bad time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: there is named character death in this chapter.  
> \---  
> Prior to this point in canon, Maggie:  
> \- sustained a life threatening injury  
> \- refused treatment because it involved the Espheni spikes  
> \- her express wishes were ignored, and she was spiked anyway  
> \- she is understandably angry and upset about this  
> \- being spiked grants a person telepathic abilities, accelerated healing, and extra strength.  
> \- the spikes enable Espheni overlords to use spiked humans as puppets/mouthpieces

John goes to find Mason as soon as they get inside the 14th’s compound. Might as well start the shitshow as soon as possible so Mason can’t call him a coward again. And, as Weaver had predicted, Mason is at the head of the situation if not in control of it. Around him are Anne and some other people from the 2nd, and people in army greens that John guesses are the 14th. Mason is arguing with one of them, a taller African-American man.

Time to do what he does best. “Hi Mason, long time no see.”

Mason and the other man both turn towards him, shock and fury on Mason’s face, curiosity on- the name patch says Wolf. John is getting a bad feeling now about how Marshall may be doing.

Wolf asks, “How did you get in here?”

“Weaver let me in.”

Wolf seems mostly satisfied with that. Mason, of course, isn’t. “You’re back, like a bad penny.”

“I said I’d be here.” John says just as stiffly.

“So you think we’re gonna win? Coming around for an assured victory where you don’t have to do any work?” Mason condescends.

“No, Mason, you’re all going to die without us. We didn’t want that to happen, so here we are.” John rolls his eyes. “I found some alien tech and I want Cochise to look at it. We think it might be powerful against the Espheni.”

Mason looks doubtful. “Cochise isn’t here.”

John makes the telephone gesture. “I know he left you a magic radiophone. Call him.”

Wolf quells his amusement. John turns to him, liking him already. “I got sixteen people with me. We’ve all got tents and so on, but we need a place to set up for tonight. We’ve also got an electric car that we can discuss finding power to charge tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” Wolf says. “I gotta finish up here, so Anston- can you get them settled in?”

“Yessir.” Anston is a smaller brown haired white woman with a fairly gnarly-but-healed scar across one cheek. “Follow me.”

Outside the door, she pauses. “Anston, as you heard. I don’t think I caught your name.”

“John Pope, pleased to meet you. Uh, Mason regards me as the leader of this group but if you need something from us, talk to Sara, Carly, or Anthony. We operate a bit more collectively than you’re probably used to.” He lowers his voice. “If you don’t mind me asking, what the hell happened here?”

Anston looks over her shoulder at Mason and Wolf, who are back to arguing, before she starts walking. “We were on pretty much a survival holding pattern since last fall or so. Last orders from up top. Doing the occasional skirmish with the Espheni. Then about two months ago we found a group of humans working with the Espheni. We killed all of them in that operation- Espheni and human. Marshall was wounded and after that something changed. Marshall said orders came from up top to hunt human collaborators in addition to skirmishing with Espheni forces but you know we hadn’t heard from them since last spring. She sent a scout to lure the 2nd in. Then she tried to kill off Mason and his leadership which sparked a- riot, and she must have said something to Weaver because he took off on his own. Something happened and she collapsed and now she’s like a zombie. And now we’re here.”

Her story mostly agrees with Weaver’s, and that’s reassuring. But there’s still uncomfortable questions that are left open. “What happened to all of the ‘collaborators’? How many were there?”

“Thirty nine.” Anston says dully. “We killed them all.”

It takes everything John has to not grab her and throw her against the concrete wall of the building they’re walking beside with all his force. Even so, it takes him a little while to compose himself enough to respond. “Orders. From up top.”

“There’s five of us- Marshall executed everyone who questioned it.”

“Jesus.” He’s going to have to dig into this some more but right now they’re approaching his group. He’ll have to get them away from Anston sometime soon and explain what’s going on and to not trust anyone from the 14th until further notice. “That’s fucked up.”

“Yeah.” Anston says.

His group is clustered up, Weaver not among them. “Everyone, Anston. Anston-” John reels off names.

“Right, grab your stuff and follow me.” She leads them all into the building.

The habitable part of Norfolk has shrunk to a little core and the 14th had pulled in as much bedding and other supplies from the surrounding buildings as they could before abandoning the them. There’s a bit of hubbub unpacking that into something that the little group can use, and quite a bit of excitement about not sleeping on the ground. After most of the chaos dies down, John looks over at Sara. “I’m gonna go check on Weaver.”

“I’ll come with you.”

They find Weaver and Marshall sitting in the pool of light outside a doorway.

Weaver’s sitting beside Marshall, her hands clasped in his. His head is down, looking at their hands. Marshall is sort of looking over him, gaze fixed into space as she rocks slightly back and forth.

John watches them. She’s nothing like the firebrand that Weaver had described to him in the car. Weaver had passed it off a little, saying something about how it is when meeting someone that you knew  _before_ . But even John could see that he’d cared about her a great deal at some point.

The overlord had taken her mind when it died.

And Weaver had killed the overlord.

It’s impossibly cruel. They’ll never know if she had a mind of her own as a clone. There’s no way to tell if Katie really existed in there after her original’s death a few months ago.

Wolf says that he might be able to find her body.

It’s probably better to fill that grave without looking into it.

Weaver’s had the worst of it, maybe out of all of them. First his daughter, going so long believing that she died cleanly in the first firestorm and then having to fight her as a skitter. He’s never spoken about that, just followed them out of the bush, black blood up to his elbows. And now this- an old friend.

John tips his head to Sara. “I’ve gotta-” He’s gotta say something to him, not that he knows what to say, not that it will do any good. “And we need to find someone to take care of Marshall. Until-”

Sara shakes her head. “No until.”

“Until we know if she’s in there at all.” He feels cold saying it. Nothing here is right.

“This fucking sucks.”

“Yeah.”

John scuffs his feet as he approaches the pair, hoping that Weaver will notice him instead of startling. It sort of works. “Time to get some rest, man.”

“Yeah.” Weaver says vaguely, an ocean of tired in his voice. “Yeah.”

Sara says quietly, “I’m gonna go get Anston, figure out where they sleep.”

John nods, grateful.

He squats down in front of them. Weaver’s been crying; his face is tracked and stone-still now, and there is absolutely nothing in Marshall’s eyes. It’s like looking into the eyes of a dog but without any of the joy that dogs have. “Let’s get you inside, yeah?”

“I- can’t leave her. I can’t.” Weaver says.

“I know.” John replies as gently as possible. “I’m not asking you to leaver her. We’re all going inside together.”

Weaver rubs one hand across his face, the other staying on Marshall’s.

Sara’s back with Anston. They take Marshall’s hands from Weaver and she doesn’t really seem to care that she’s being moved.

Anston commands, “Marshall, stand up.”

John gets Weaver to his feet as Anston and Sara drag Marshall to her feet. “Marshall, walk with us.”

Anston slowly leads them. Marshall is sort of walking on her own, and Weaver hasn’t taken his arm out of John’s.

They get Marshall sat down on her bed, and her boots off, and Anston starts stripping back the bedding, just taking it further off the bed than is necessary to get Anston under the covers. Sara makes a questioning sound.

“She’s probably gonna wet the bed.” Anston says, the collapse of the structure of her life finally cracking through in her voice. “I have no idea how to tell my brain dead CO to take a piss. I can deal with this better than that.”

“Shit.” Sara whispers. “Yeah, okay. We’ll deal with that.”

Anston looks like she’s about to cry. Sara grips her shoulder. “Five more minutes.”

Anston nods and inhales and says, “Okay.”

They get Marshall down on her side like a drunk and under a blanket, but only one because Weaver has collected the other one and laid it out on the floor beside Marshall’s cot, clearly intending to sleep there.

“Hey,” John says, kneeling beside him. He wants to say, go to your real bed. But it wouldn’t work on him, so he says instead, “See you tomorrow, okay.”

“Okay.” Weaver responds dully.

Sara heads out with Anston’s shoulders tucked under her arm. John trails closely after them.

Weaver sleeps on the floor beside her bed.

Joh and Sara end up in  _bunk beds_ because someone in their group has a sense of humor. Sara has the top of their pair, and John the bottom.

This lasts about five minutes before Sara climbs back down and joins him in the too-small bed. Too hot, too close, someone else hissing at them to knock it off but it’s so much better than that horrid air gap, looking up at the mattress springs above him and  thinking  about loss.

The morning is cool and bright, the sunlight in the courtyard just a little too sharp. Someone had suggested that maybe one of the telepathic kids could try to talk to Marshall and John’s feeling all too certain that something is gonna go wrong. Whatever answer they get out of this is not one anyone is gonna like.

“Ben should do it. He has more experience.” Mason says, not really suggesting.

“No.” Maggie holds firm. “I’m doing it.” She looks around at all of them, determination on her face. Sara mouths _you got this_ at her.

Maggie turns to Ben. “Walk me through this.”

They go over to the bench where Marshall is sat. They sit at her feet in front of her. Maggie grabs Ben’s hands, staring him straight in the eyes. “No bullshit, okay?”

He nods. She presses their foreheads together. “Okay, go.”

Ben says, “It’s like this,” and then something unintelligible and inhuman comes out of his mouth. Both his and Maggie’s spikes light up.

There’s a long pause where nothing seems to happen. Then Marshall jerks, a full body convulsion, and Maggie’s face curls into a grimace.

John thinks, the connection goes both ways, as Maggie’s face warps into a snarl, so pained that no sound comes out of her. Ben says something sharp in the inhuman voice, rearing back out of contact with her.

Maggie yells, pure anguished fury; Marshall stiffens before slumping over, lax in a way that she wasn’t before. At the same time; Weaver screams and Ben smashes his head against Maggie’s.

“You killed her!”

Maggie covers the spot on her forehead that Ben had hit with her palm, tears in her eyes. “You felt that, right, Katie wasn’t in there, there was nobody in there to connect to. I couldn’t-”

She breaks off; Weaver’s punched her. She flails back at him, close quarters and unprepared. John lurches out of his freeze and runs to drag Weaver off of her.

Maggie scrambles away, shouting. “Better to die than live as a mindless puppet!”

She lifts her ponytail; they can all see her spikes now. They’re still glowing, and John wonders with a sickening lurch how powerful she really is. “Better to be _dead_ than kept alive unwillingly!”

She storms off. Sara looks after her and then sprints after her. Hal follows a moment later.

Weaver hadn’t really resisted him after John had pulled him away from Maggie. He’d fallen down to the ground and is openly sobbing now, as John crouches beside him trying to shield him from onlookers with his body.

Mason is watching them, face unreadable.

John demands. “Get them out of here. Get everyone away from him.”

Mason does it, for once not contesting him, gathering everyone away from the spectacle. People start leaving as soon as they see that they should.

When it’s just him and Weaver in the courtyard, John lets him go to sit beside him.

He will wait as long as it takes.


	13. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John thinks about the future, and alliances.

The one thing that they all agree on is burying the bodies. After that it all falls apart. The argument had ended without a resolution. From his place on the low wall overlooking the 14th filling dirt into the trench of bodies, John is thinking that they should start dragging those conversations out in front of everybody because they should know. They should know that Wolf wants to bury the atrocity and that Mason is willing to help him keep that secret. And John thinks that’s a bad way to start the beginning of the end.

It’s easy to bury one body and to place a marker. Weaver knew Marshall’s age but not her birthday; they take a guess at the month to put beside the year.

It’s just as difficult to bury 39. Thirty  _nine_ . He can’t really wrap his mind around it. He doesn’t want to. The trench had been half filled with dirt; now they’re covering the rest and leveling the ground. Wolf says it was Marshall’s orders, like it’s an honest mistake that should simply be forgotten.

Marshall had cowed them by picking out people who had questioned orders and executing them. Branded them species-traitors and ruled through fear.

But how many would it have taken to overpower Marshall? She was just one woman. And an overlord.

It makes Mason’s bullshit pale in comparison but now Wolf and Mason are  _agreeing_ and John is the odd one out.

Business as usual.

He still can’t use both arms; his shoulder still grinds when he moves it without the sling, and there’s just something incredibly bleak about watching other people bury the secrets. He wants to go back to the morning, the brief moment when nothing but Sara was in his mind.

But that’s no way to build a nation.

He pulls his fingers through the hair at the back of his neck, roughly pulling tangles out. He  _could_ have stayed with Sara, he  _could_ have not confronted Mason, he  _could_ have not come here.

He wouldn’t be able to live with himself, knowing this. God, he’s gonna make moonshine as soon as he can; there hasn’t been enough alcohol to get really fucked up on since, fuck, Boston, and there’s not enough to the tribute whiskey left. Applejack, maybe, find an orchard and a press that isn’t rust-frozen, let the cider ferment and freeze, pick the ice out until what’s left is strong enough to burn.

How? are they gonna build a nation? If they win- how. It’s so much bigger than him, bigger than getting through winter. Winter he can do; winter he has done before. But the whole future?

He can’t do it. Mason can’t do it. Wolf is still desperately clinging to the belief that there’s someone further up the chain than him to take the blame. Weaver hasn’t spoken to anyone since Marshall died, floating around like a ghost. They’re in the third year post invasion: it’s them, they’re the whole length of the chain.

You can’t just  _say_ there’s a nation. People would get pissed.  _He’d_ be pissed if someone showed up and told him that he belonged to a new country now. What the hell are they gonna do?

Not this. No buried secrets. No plans that don’t have an escape route. This  _was_ America, now it’s- fuck. Just let everyone else figure it out, he’s retiring after this.

That’s as much of a plan as anything else. He hops down from the wall and wanders off. He can be more useful elsewhere. More mouths, more food problems, and he really needs to see Wolf about charging a Leaf.

Or maybe Anston; he’d pretty thoroughly pissed off Wolf by insisting that the mass grave should be marked with all the names that the 14th could remember.


	14. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cochise returns and they get some information about the thing that John's group found. John and Sara have some reminiscing, sort of.

The 14th isn’t exactly thrilled when Cochise lands his warship in the center of the compound in the warming before-noon light. John just wishes that he’da warned them beforehand, just so that he and Weaver could have started talking the 14th down  _before_ the assault rifles came out. But what’s done is done and nobody got hurt.

So it’s fine! He’s just gonna have a word with Mason or Weaver later about warning Cochise about dangers. Or like, landing zones. But that’s all for later, because Cochise is here to talk with him specifically.

He has to get the Device from Carly and Eric, who have been guarding it and that means the entire group comes with him to see Cochise.

Carly carefully unwraps it and lays it out on the table for Cochise- and everyone else, they’d been keeping it hidden and secret in the bottom of her backpack until now- to see.

It’s clearly of alien origin, but not of any of the species that they’ve already had contact with, and it also somewhat resembles a light bulb if it was made out of a classic glass coke bottle.

Cochise picks it up bare handed, clearly unafraid of any effects that it might have on him. He inspects it closely. “It is certainly Dornia but I do not know what it is. Where did you say you found it?”

John hadn’t, “We found it lying out on the hood of a tractor in a barn.”

“Strange.” Cochise says, “I need to take this back to my ship for analysis.”

“Let me come with you,” John offers, quick on his feet.

“Of course.” Cochise allows.

Weaver and Mason follow him, and Wolf. Maybe Wolf will calm down after Cochise is helpful.

It looks like Cochise is comparing it to a picture dictionary, it really does. They wait, watching the diagrams fly by, all sorts of things that they’ve never seen before. John wants to ask; perhaps there are other useful things in there that they simply don’t know about.

“Ah, here.” Cochise has found a match. John can’t read what is presumably text displayed beside the diagram. Cochise translates as he reads it slowly, “It is reservoir of- approximately a virus of the mind. It infects groups very quickly by hijacking any telepathic communications. It is usually fatal- not because of damage to the body, but the absence of the mind- environmental factors.”

John takes a moment to digest that. It roughly scans with what they had seen with Lexi, if Lexi and that overlord had been connected.

Wolf is quicker, “If the right Espheni is infected, could all of their communications be crippled?”

“In theory.”

“Have you confirmed the queen in DC?” Mason asks.

“No. We do not have enough soldiers to attempt recon in an area that we can not scan first.”

“Right.” Wolf says, deeply unimpressed.

“I think we should scout and develop a plan. Like I said before, this is too good to pass up.” Mason looks at John like he’s trying to head him off.

John doesn’t give him the opportunity. “I agree. We should also wait until the 4th Maine arrives before we make any plans. They might have more information and are only a day or two away.”

“Time’s wasting.” Mason urges.

“The 4th may know if the bridges over the Potomac are out- I think they’re coming from the north-west. And we need to prepare supplies for traveling, and inventory what the 14th has in terms of munitions. That will all influence what our final strategies are.” John smiles threateningly.

“Our munitions are a state secret.” Wolf says.

Weaver finally speaks up. “We have to assume that the Espheni know everything that Marshall did. That means we have no secrets from them, and everything to gain if there’s something that she didn’t know about.”

“And the state is gone, Wolf.” John digs at him.

Wolf scowls but can’t disagree with either of their assessments.

“Weaver should lead the inventory, with your assistance of course, Wolf.” Mason decides and adjourns the meeting.

John finds Mason’s implicit assumption that Wolf will lie about what the 14th has pretty funny because it’s exactly the kind of thing that John would do. Looks like Mason’s learning.

He sticks around to talk to Cochise after the others leave. He wants to know more about what the Volm can and can not see with their scanners. It is unfortunately not much more than radar, so he wraps up the Device in his jacket, since Cochise had carried it here bare handed.

“It won’t hurt you.”

“Better safe than sorry. Thanks for the information.”

“I am sorry that I could not be more helpful.”

“Seriously.” John steps out into the bright sunlight outside of the warship with the bundle of his jacket and Device tucked into his sling.

Mason ambushes him almost the moment he’s within earshot of the compound. “Pope. I can tell you’re lying to me.”

“About what?”

“You didn’t seem surprised when Cochise described what it could do.”

“I said I was here to win, Mason.”

“No, you said you thought it might be powerful. I want to know why you thought that.”

John looks at him critically. “There was an ‘incident’ around our acquisition of the device which Cochise’s explanation confirmed.”

“Details, Pope. You told me to give a shit about the small stuff, so give me the details so that I can do that.”

Small stuff, right. John sighs. “Pinky promise that you don’t need or want to know until after all this.” He holds his hand out, pinky first.

“What are you, a child?” Mason leaves him hanging. “That’s not good enough. You can’t tell me to do better and then stop me from trying.”

“Yeah, I know.” It feels fucking bad, but given that he’d had to commit to a suicide mission to keep Mason from compromising everything the last time Lexi was around, well-. It feels less bad than that. “I checked with Weaver and keeping you in the dark helps us win. I know you don’t trust me, but maybe you should trust him.”

“And,” John continues, “If you lean on Weaver, myself, or any of my people about it, I will put you up against that wall and finish what the 14th started.”

There must be something in his tone because Mason just says, “Right, eyes on the prize.”

“That’s the spirit.” John resettles the bundle into his sling and walks away before Mason can really rile him up.

After the first successful supply raid all those weeks ago, John and Sara had gone a bit easier on the tribute whiskey. It's been a month and a half or more now they're down to the very bottom of it. It's bittersweet; when it's gone, it's gone.

They'll probably finish it tonight while sitting out on the hillside under the stars. There used to be a park area here, maybe a garden. Now there are boulders among deeply overgrown grasses and a few benches hiding among the sprawling shrubs. They're sitting on one of the benches, wrapped up in John's blanket and letting the past and the future collapse inward on them.

“I-” Sara starts but immediately trails off.

“Yeah?” He kisses her shoulder.

“I don’t know how I survived the first couple of months. The invasion happened while I was at work. They locked down the plant but eventually people started breaking out. It’s not like they could keep us there, you know? Everyone worried about their family and their kids and whatever. And I was just sitting there in my cube watching it all burn on CNN until the internet went out.”

She shakes her head slightly. “Everyone else trying to go home and protect things and I just knew that I had nothing. Nothing worth going back to my apartment for, nothing worth leaving the plant for. Just absolutely goddamn nothing.”

“I was finally free of it all. And I was so fucking scared. Of the freedom- of. People tried to hold on like crabs in a pot and I figured that if I could wait that out I might be able to do it. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I stayed there until the emergency generators gave up. Three or four days. I took my car and went back to my apartment and got some of my clothes and my jacket and a kitchen knife and a bottle of water and then I just. Left. Wandered around for a while. Left my car on the side of the road when it ran out of gas. Fell in and out with a couple groups, spent the winter with a couple of girls out of Tennessee. Split up with them in the spring because we couldn’t fucking stand each other anymore.”

“I ended up in that farmhouse you found me in. I worked the gardens up again, found seeds and tried to grow things. It kinda worked, enough that I thought I could do it alone. I never thought.”

“I never thought we’d actually have a chance at winning. At starting over. Whatever this is.”

“I wanted to relapse so fucking bad for a while because what was the point of it, just to be alive and alone? I just couldn’t get my hands on anything. And then you came along and offered me people who were trying. It was everything I needed and-. I couldn’t just give up my security there.”

John kisses her shoulder again. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not. What we’re trying to do here is more important than my fear. That’s all.”

“We’re gonna make it, one way or another.” He’s not sure if he means all of them, or just the two of them.

She snugs herself back against him. “You seem awful confident about that.”

“We’ve got a superweapon and a guy who’s willing to die to use it.”

“That better not be you.” There’s warning in Sara’s voice.

John shakes his head so that she can feel it. “Not me. Mason. He hasn’t volunteered yet but he’s gonna and me ‘n Weaver are just gonna let him.”

“Mason- you cared about him, didn’t you.”

“He saved my life.” John says quietly. “He was- I set myself up as a king at the beginning. Had a sword and a posse and everything. It was the first time that there was nothing stopping me from being the way I wanted to be and I went- a little crazy. Jail didn’t make me a better person, yanno? And I was already a murderer.”

Sara pats his leg sympathetically.

“No.” He says, suddenly angry at himself, at her sympathy. “No, I traded the lives of my gang to go with Mason. I let them take a direct airstrike. Maggie’s the only one who knows what I did because she defected to Mason before I did.”

“Tom treated me like an equal. Talked philosophy with me, can you fucking believe? And took me in and showed me that I didn’t need-” he waves a hand- “it was like a drug. I wanted to prove myself and letting them die was the easiest way to free myself.”

“He believed so damn much and I got swept up in it. It made me a better person, somehow. And then he.” John falls quiet for a moment. “He’s changed. He’s not the kind of person who’d take in a piece of shit like me in anymore.”

Sara speaks slowly, like she’s still trying to process what he just said, like she doesn’t want to be taking Mason’s side in this. “He took Marty in.”

“That was all Weaver.” Weaver had said a lot after Marshall’s death. It was a bit of work to piece it all together and the whole picture was rather nightmarish. He’s somewhat glad he wasn’t there for all of that.

“Really?”

“Weaver talked him down after Marty shot him and  _still_ brought him in after seeing the bodies he was keeping.”

“He was keeping  _bodies_ ? Anne didn’t mention that!”

John sighs. “Marty was delusional and believed that his wife and kids were still alive despite having their bodies stashed in trash bags.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“No, I can’t see the Mason I know being charitable towards that. Hell, I’m not sure  _I_ would be.”

John nods in agreement. “Marty’s a liability but Weaver thought he could help him. I hear he’s doing better now anyway.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“I hear he’s a chemist too, so Mason is probably entertaining this project at risk to the rest of us in order to replace my skills as the ‘cook’.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Sara grunts. “The guy who makes the explosives should be at least somewhat mentally stable.”

“Hey now-!” He pokes at her side, she stabs him with her shoulderblade, and then they’re laughing and play fighting within the confines of the blanket.


	15. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The 4th Maine arrives. Some more information comes to light. A plan is hatched.

The entire first day of inventorying the 14th’s munitions is slow work. It’s spread out through dozens of buildings over the peninsula. A lot of doors have rusted shut, or the keys have been lost, and while the 14th has stabilized fuel and a handful of vehicles that they start once a week and leave running just long enough to charge the batteries, Wolf isn’t letting them use any of them, or even to power a generator to use an angle grinder on door hinges and locks. And Sara, Carly, Sam, and Eric have taken the Leaf to go look for more electric cars and solar panels so they can’t even use it as the world’s shittiest tractor.

John sort of gets it, they’ll need that fuel in the future but it’s making for  _incredibly_ slow going right now.

Wolf hates the whole operation. It’s baring the secrets of what the military did and did not do during the invasion with what’s left in the storehouses and the picture is unflattering. There’s almost nothing left of the larger munitions; anti-aircraft, anti-tank, anything with serious range or power, anything with an onboard computer. John’s mentally writing those off anyway; if they can’t run it using the Leaf as a power source, there’s no guarantee that they can run it all.

Most of what’s left is smaller stuff, mostly for handheld and vehicle mounted weapons. It’s fine because that’s mostly what the 2nd and John’s group is used to fighting with by now but it also shows how the military had simply  _stopped_ right around the time it went from an invasion to an occupation with sporadic human insurgency.

The 14th is helping with the inventory but John is getting the feeling that the only reason that Wolf hasn’t ordered them not to is because they’d ignore him and destroy what’s left of his command.

He probably shouldn’t instigate a second mutiny, at least not while Mason’s still glaring suspiciously at him.

So it’s about midafternoon when he hears motorcycle engines on the horizon. He’s not the only one- Anston looks over at him, saying, “I’m gonna find Captain Wolf and Mason.”

“Meet us at the gates, yeah?” He agrees. She goes.

The 14th maintains a compound guard and John trots off in the direction of the sound, eager to not have a repeat of the situation with Cochise.

At the barricade, there’s a phalanx of motorcycles, thirty or forty, and the guard with their rifles low but ready. Everybody seems to be cool. Tense, but cool.

The motorcycles are all idling, not deafening but the low rumble is crawling into his lungs and heart and making a home there. Fuck, he’s missed that. Most of the leading motorcycles have rifle holsters mounted to the front forks; he sees some crossed over shoulders, a machete and a crossbow too. There’s a preponderance of black leather and full face helmets.

The leader flips his visor up. “I assume this is the right place since they’re all pointing rifles at us. Are you Tom Mason?”

John laughs, “Hell no, I’m John Pope, jackass of all trades.” He looks back. Mason and Wolf are approaching just shy of a jog. “Mason and Captain Wolf, recently promoted. How about you?”

“I’m Enos.” The guy says, not offering a surname. John looks him over; he’s a rangy guy and all of his gear, motorcycle included, looks older in the way stuff does when it’s seen hard use and maintenance in equal measure. Enos gestures. “This is the 4th Maine. We’re made up of a few groups but if you want something from us, you go through me.”

“Gotchya.” John nods.

Mason and Wolf arrived in time for the introductions and Enos redirects his attention to them. “Pleased to meet both of you. Mind if we park?”

“Yeah.” Wolf says, “follow the road. You’ll see a maintained courtyard, anywhere in there is fine.”

“Sure thing, thanks.” Enos waves his hand in a few gestures and the whole group revs up and rolls off as a unit.

John turns and watches them go. There’s a wide variety of bikes in the group, everything from intro-level Hondas to sport bikes with plastic body panels savaged to support panniers. Many of the motorcycles have trailers, two of them have complicated looking plumbing and tanks on the trailer. It’s a tight outfit, that’s for sure.

He follows them back into the compound.

John is snooping on them almost before  Enos  has his helmet off and his jacket unzipped. He can’t figure out what the plumbing is, and he doesn’t recognize the back patches. There seem to be two main groups based on the patches; the Centaurs MC have a circular one with a strapping lad of a centaur in a power stance in the middle and the Moving Violations MC have a black and purple patch featuring the head of a battle axe foregrounded by roaring fire to round out the shape of the patch. There’s a few other club patches scattered throughout but they’re a minority.

Enos is watching him get in the way with some amusement. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, uh, how are you fueling all this?”

Enos scrubs his hands back through his flop of iron grey hair, shaking out the helmet hair. “Syngas. We run the gasifiers when we make camp. Works pretty well.”

“Huh.” Another, much younger, guy has come up beside Enos.

“Hey, this is Meatball, our social officer.”

“Hey, whassup?” Meatball offers.

“Hell of a name.”

Meatball shrugs. “Works for me.”

“So what’s happening?”

“Whew, when I say it’s a lot-” John waves it away, “Well, you’ll find out. Right now we’re inventorying what we have in terms of munitions and trying to figure out some strategy and routes into DC- which I was hoping y’all could help us with.”

Anston shows up then, Anthony in tow. John introduces them and then backs off to let Anston do her job of getting the 4th settled in before anyone wanders off and finds trouble.

The Leaf party comes back just before sundown, slowly rolling through the red rays cutting across the landscape. The roof rack has two deer trussed up on it and when Sara, Carly, Sam, and Eric pile out of it, they’re exuberant with success.

Sara darts over to him; John catches her, swinging her in to kiss her cheek. Sara pats his ass.

Eric hollers at them to knock it off and Sara flips him off instead.

Carly announces the good news: two more Leafs, a Volt, and a house with solar panels that they might be able to bring back online  _and_ they have enough charge to get back there so they won’t have to push the damn car to the place.

It’s cause enough for a party, and John’s group sets to butchering the deer for dinner that night while the 14th looks on in horrified bemusement. Isaiah’s gotten quick with it, but it really makes him wonder how the 14th survived this long without seriously taking up hunting. They still have potatoes and small onions, and a bit of corn from their last day on the road, and the 4th has peppers and summer squash and early pears. It’s enough.

They’d called a planning meeting for the morning of the next day, and Enos is early to it for perhaps the same reasons John is.

Wolf has co-opted Marshall’s ‘war room’. It’s an awkwardly rectangular room with doors at both ends, which John opens in order to encourage people to snoop on the proceedings, and a table in the middle with a big map laid out on it. There’s markings on it from Marshall’s traitor hunting- John sees part of Mason’s path up the coast tracked out on it, and a couple of western lines that all end rather abruptly.

The 64/644 tunnel terminals are crossed out with the annotation ‘water!’.

There’s a wiggly circle around the lower part of DC, right around the National Mall and the surrounding blocks. The mall is labeled ‘Espheni’ and the circle is labeled ‘wall’. So there’s some information but it dates from Marshall. Might be accurate, might not be.

Enos breaks the early quiet, “So what’s the plan?”

“So far?” John shrugs. “Stroll up to DC and behead the entire Espheni force in one blow.”

“So simple.”

Enos circles around the table, standing beside John to read the writing from a better angle. “My eyes ain’t what they used to be but this looks like the route that I was taking here. I count only three groups here: Mason, yourself, and Wolf. So what happened to these guys?”

“Well.” John says, thinking of grave dirt that hasn’t settled yet. “Do you want the long version or the short version?”

“The long version.”

“Good choice.” John pauses, trying to figure out where to begin. “So there’s 39 bodies buried out back.”

Enos is looking at him now, full cold clear attention. He feels like a mouse under the attention of a steel eyed hawk.

“My group arrived during the aftermath, so understand that this is what I’ve pieced together in the last couple of days. Marshall had been trapping other humans that she deemed ‘Espheni collaborators’ and executing them after a farce trial for treason. She caught Mason this way, and I imagine she meant to catch you.”

“Something went wrong with Mason’s execution and revealed that she was under Espheni mind control the whole time. Weaver found and killed the controlling overlord. That’s when we found him, and he led us here. Wolf took Marshall’s command and along with Mason, wants to pretend that all never happened.”

Enos nods curtly. “What was the rest of the 14th’s thoughts about this?”

“Orders are orders. Some disagreem-” John hears footsteps and breaks off. “So I was wondering if you had any updated information about this area?”

Enos deftly catches the redirection. “No, but coming this way, the roads are fairly passable.”

It’s Sara with a steaming mug in each hand, and following close behind her are Mason and Wolf. She comes over, putting a mug by his hand and tucking her chin over his shoulder. “It looks so close.”

“And yet so far.” He murmurs, snugging back against her.

“I’m going to take the Leaf crew out again today; we’re gonna try to get that house online and if we’re really lucky, get the new Volt hooked up to charge.”

“Don’t let Carly trip and fall.”

Sara laughs, kissing the side of his head, “I won’t.”

“If you two are _quite_ done,” Mason glares at him like John personally represents all of his shortcomings, “shall we get started?”

Sara cheerfully flips him off and saunters out.

“Yeah, we were just discussing getting some updated information about these areas, since all of this is Marshall’s information.” John doesn’t exactly trust anything that Marshall left behind.

Wolf interjects, “We scouted those over the last couple of months, it’s all accurate.”

Weaver’s rolled up, looking like hell, “Forgive me if I take that with a grain of salt.”

Enos gestures, continuing the marked route for his group, “These roads are all passable to motor vehicles. These bridges here, here, and here, are damaged but light vehicles should be able to pass.”

Wolf makes some more notes on the maps. “These four bridges land directly into Espheni controlled land. I don’t think approaching that way is viable.”

“That leaves- what’s that- pretty close to the wall.” John isn’t overly familiar with the layout of DC so for now he has to trust Wolf’s statements as little as he likes it.

“Georgetown- the next bridge is up here, if we can’t use Georgetown, we have to go around the Potomac.”

“I would prefer not to.” Enos says dryly.

“No shit.” John agrees.

“Gonna scam me for a boat, Pope?”

“Sorry, the Leaf doesn’t float but I’m sure that I could get something going if the 14th can spare the fuel.”

Wolf says “Nope,” before John’s sarcasm can really set in, which he resents.

They don’t get much beyond estimating some routes and the respective travel times of the various groups before Cochise wanders in, followed by a harried looking Anston. “I have more information on the Device.”

They greet him except for Wolf who is still acting like Cochise is more of a threat than an ally, and then they have to explain who Cochise is to Enos, who seems to take it all in stride.

Cochise has the true name for the Device now. He pronounces it carefully for them to mimic and Enos makes a decent go at it before John says, “It’s still the Device. If we find another, then we’ll figure out a better name.”

This gets a laugh out of Weaver, at least. Weaver is starting to look a little less tired now, but still the grey aura of a man worn down beyond his limits persists.

Cochise more or less ignores all of this petty human drama and continues, “I have confirmed that it will disrupt the Espheni telepathy. Worldwide. Any Espheni connected to the network should be impacted by it.”

John isn’t sure that Cochise has enough of a grasp on human humor for that pause before  _worldwide_ to be intentionally dramatic.

"You’re fucking kidding me," John says, in a little bit of shock that it could really be that easy and that total. It's been over three months since he died and fell through to a nightmare world, about two since he saw Mason shoot an overlord while Ben and Maggie were still linked to it and nothing has really made sense since then but this? This is fine. Aliens are easy. They may not make any goddamn sense either but that's because they don't have any intel on them, not because everything is fucking insane. If Cochise says it's fine, it's fine. He’s never lied to them. "How are we, uh, applying this to the queen?"

"Subcutaneous." Cochise says precisely. "You will have to stab her with it."

"…not me," John promptly unvolunteers himself.

"I'll do it," Mason says grimly.

Enos looks between the three of them. Weaver cuts in before Enos can say anything, "We'll take volunteers later."

John sighs to himself. Mason isn’t gonna let them rig this election and force his hand again and he’s not even inclined to try. John brings them back to strategy. “Will it kill them?”

“It disrupts their telepathic communications only.” Cochise says precisely.

“So they’ll be uncoordinated.” Wolf nods.

“Whack-a-mole.” John mutters grimly.

Enos snorts.

Mason squints at him, “Care to share with the class, Pope?”

“They’re dumb as shit when they aren’t under control, right? We saw that at the valley. So we sneak up on the queen and stab her with the Device and then kill every overlord and skitter that dares show its face.”

Weaver nods. “Need a lotta manpower to pull that off.”

“We establish a secure camp and push out across the city each day to clear it out.” Mason suggests.

“Or,” Anne interjects, “We go off into the woods and let them starve to death.”

Enos makes an approving sound at that.

“Runs the risk of a mothership establishing control.” Mason says like he knows something that the rest of them don’t.

John’s tired of that shit. “Cochise, are there motherships?”

“There could be.”

“When?”

“Fifty to a hundred of your years, but with the queen and all of her forces dead, they won’t come here to reestablish control until they have warships to back them up.”

“So we got time. I got no problem letting them starve and in the meantime encouraging them to go extinct.”

“So that’s the plan?” Anne tries to clarify.

A vague nod goes around the group. “More or less.”

It takes them well into the afternoon of the next day for them to lay out a coherently detailed plan to propose to their people. Inventory is still going on but it’s close enough to done that they feel there will be no major surprises. Wolf is finally willing to spend fuel on the collective operation- and the 4ths gasifiers are rounding out the supply while they’ve been waiting.

Mason and Wolf call them all together into a large room that was once a hybrid gymnasium/auditorium in a grade school to tell them the plan. The glossy wooden floor is warped with water damage but the rain has been holding off and for now the ceiling does not drip on the crowd of people.

John stands up there with all of their leaders: Mason, Anne, Weaver, Wolf, Enos and Meatball. He feels the web of connections and alienations sprawling between them like tangible ropes and he wants to step down off the edge of the low stage and into the crowd where he belongs but Sara is looking back at him; he must represent his group.

Mason is speaking for all of them and John wonders, looking out over the about 200-strong crowd, does Mason feel the responsibility too? Does he feel the fear? They had all agreed on the plan and they are presenting it here to their people for comment, but does he feel the edges of the plan, the black hole that DC could be into which they could all fall and never return from.

No matter how carefully they plan, no matter how successful they are, no matter if the Device works better than Cochise said and kills every Espheni instantly, not all of them are coming back from this. He knows this, he knows that Enos knows this, he thinks that Weaver knows this but is maybe too blinded by loss to separate himself from Mason, and Mason-

Mason is saying, “If you have suggestions or questions, please come to the front now or anytime until sundown. Thank you.”

He must have spaced out for the entire duration of Mason’s blathering. Well, he didn’t need to say anything anyway.

He hops down off of the stage as a wave of people come to the front. It gets loud pretty quick despite the trickle of people leaving the room so he fades to the back, deciding that he’ll explain it all to his group later when he can hear himself think.

The sun is getting long in the sky, air still warm but the cool crawling up in the shadows of the buildings when he finds Sara in a small, isolated courtyard. There used to be a daycare in one of the buildings here. Most of what’s left outside is a playground, bright blue bars and grate floors standing above a bounded box of weeds and overgrown grasses. Sara’s perched up at the top, kicking her legs over the edge of a railing. He swings up to join her, feeling comically large against the scale of the structure.

“Hey.”

He sits next to her, shoulders touching. “What’s up?”

“We’re really doing it, huh.”

“Yeah.” He edges his hand over to hers, tangling their fingers together. There’s a concrete wall in front of them, maybe fifty feet away, cracked and mossy and mesmerizing with lichen. “This could be it.”

“Yeah.” The beginning or the end. Won’t know until they do it.

Sara groans. “My ass is asleep.”

“Oh no.”

She slowly tilts her way back onto the grating floor from her perch on the railing. John takes her hand to steady himself as he does the same; then she pulls him into a hug.

He presses himself to her as best he can with his stupid arm in the way, heads tilting together.

They kiss for a while, no intention but to enjoy each other. One of her hands goes to the back of his head, his hand goes to the small of her back under her jacket, then fingertips down the back of her jeans.

“Here?” She laughs.

“Fewer people here than there have been anytime in the last month,” he murmurs into the side of her neck. “I’ve missed you.”

“Hey.” She says, “I’m right here.”

He can’t say that’s not what he means so he kisses the side of her neck, collarbone to jawline, until she giggles and grabs his ass. She pulls him to press her back against one of the structure supports; he does, leaning into her. She groans deeply.

“I need you.”

“I know.” Then a beat. “I need you too.”

“I’ll fuck you right here, if you want.”

“Kinky.”

He shrugs. “It’s nice here.”

§

“It is.” She kisses him then, switching hard to greed and taking him with her.

He wants to lift her, get her legs around his hips, but he can’t do it one handed and she’s clearly thinking the same thing-

“I want to be in you-”

“Fuck, please, I want-”

She reaches down between them, getting into his pants to pull his cock out as he cups her crotch, pressing his fingers in to encourage her heat.

She groans, “Get down.”

He staggers back; there’s a little step in the grate, he sits on it. Adjusts himself, showing off a little. She smirks at him, “Cute.”

Sara pulls her boots and jeans and underwear off, oh fuck, they’re going all the way up here. She drops a condom packet on him; he hastens to roll it on as she rubs at her cunt. She kneels down over him, splitting her fingers to let his cock go up into her, he helps guide it, it’s a joint effort until she’s sitting across his hips.

It’s amazing every time, the sensation the- everything. He’s laid back, unable to support himself on both elbows, she’s got one hand on his chest and the other on her clit.

She’s rocking her hips, not lifting, just moving him inside her, feeling him. He slides his hand up her leg, thumb rubbing at the edge of her bush, then higher up into the heat trapped under her shirt, rucking it up until he can rub the soft spot at the side of her breast. She twists her bra a little so that he can access it better.

“You feel so fucking good.” He groans.

Sara grins at him, uncoordinated and easy and happy.

He grins back up at her, “Hey.”

She braces herself and starts riding him, a smooth rolling motion in her hips and it seems like moments before she’s got him moaning.

“Shh.” She pushes her fingers into his mouth, he sucks on them. The motion tips her weight off of his hips; he can thrust up into her.

She yelps and laughs, “Keep doing that.”

He does, rocking up into her, trying to brace his boots on the somehow suddenly friction-free grating below him.

She is rubbing furiously at her clit, he can feel her tightening around him, “Yes, fuck, come on, come for me-” so tight that he feels like he’s gonna burst.

She groans, drawn out, he can feel, not just see, the relaxation flow through her like a wave. She settles down onto his hips, resting.

He's still rocking a little, tiny desperate motions, he can feel her orgasm aftershocks, he wants _he wants_. She says, “Give me a moment.”

“I want-” He gasps, digging his fingers into her butt and making her squirm.

“Hey,” She grunts, grabbing his chest through his shirt. It’s almost painful and he jerks. “Oh, you’re going to be fun when I get some time.”

“Please-”

She rocks on him, how is such a small motion so intense, he’s arcing back and pushing up against her weight and it’s hurting in his shoulder but he doesn’t care, “Please-”

“Come for me, you’re so good to me-”

And it’s like the permission releases him, he presses up into her, feeling like he's stretching in a weird way and then he’s coming and she’s got one hand on his face, thumb at the corner of his mouth. He’s panting, “ _Oh_.”

After a moment, she rolls off of him to lay beside him, looking up at the intensely orange streaked blue sky above them. “Nice.”

“Please put your pants on.” He eventually says.

“What?”

He gestures around at the wide open area around them.

“The air feels good.”

He laughs.

§


	16. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang goes to DC.

250 miles, more or less.

John smooths his hand over the map. The route they’re taking is marked, and all that’s left to do is  _do it_ . The 4th Maine left that morning, John and his group leave the next morning. The 2nd and 14th leave when they find the queen.

250 miles. That’s 2-4 hours, depending on a guy’s certainty that he can evade the cops. The 4th is the most mobile out of all of them and they’re planning on four days of travel time. Not because they can’t do it in one day, but because they’re scouting for John’s group. They are finding solar panels and radioing back to John’s group to guide them and in the expanding temporal gap between them, John’s group turns solar panels into power houses. They in turn are radioing back to the 2nd and 14th to tell them which ones are online for their support vehicles. John’s planned 8 days of travel time, and the rest of them are on foot and planning two weeks.

It’s almost easy. It’s certainly less nerve-wracking than the trip up to Norfolk- with solar panels already scouted, they’re no longer betting their only car against being able to find a place that they can get online. The places are found, and they’ve got two cars now. Both are packed full of supplies and equipment to protect the encampment in DC with.

Almost easy. It’s still a nauseating string of rotting houses and laying planks across holey floors to walk on and praying that nobody slips and falls through, and hoping that the expired filters in their respirator masks are enough to keep the mold out of their lungs.

The 4th is also reporting increased black hornet attacks during their last two days on the road, and more the longer they stay camped in one place. They’re mapping the tentative range of the hornets and starting operations outside of that. But no swarm, yet. At least there’s no swarm.

And John still can’t lift his left arm enough to steady his pistol with both hands. He knows that it’s too early to abandon the sling; Anne and Sara have told him well enough. It had taken him six weeks to heal when he’d broken it as an idiot teenager, it’s only been four, and he’s older now. He  _knows_ that Anne is right, and he’s not going to get carried off by a black hornet simply because he can’t get his pistol up under its mandibles and blow its brains out before they’re too far off the ground to survive the fall.

So he’s leaving the sling off when he’s not working, just to get used to being able to move it and the ways that it hurts. The bone grinding sounds and sensations are harder to get used to but there’s hornets the size of men in the sky and he can worry about healing after they’ve all walked away from this.

Well, they did find an orchard and Maggie is perfecting how to drop a black hornet with a single shot. It’s not all bad.

Row and Celeste from the 4th meet them before they cross the Potomac, and lead them up river to a smaller bridge. John had hardly spoken to either of them before they’d rolled out but they’re both so distinctive that he remembers their names; Row is unusually burly for a woman, and Celeste has short hair and stars embroidered onto her jacket. In the last few days the skitter and black hornet attacks at the camp at the university had grown too frequent, so the 4th had moved camp further upriver to the grounds of an old rec center.

The centers building are trashed; broken windows and three humid summers hadn’t left much usable behind. But by the same token, the baseball green is lush and weedy now that it has been freed from the tyranny of pesticides. The camp is set out there.

It feels far too exposed to John, but the attacks haven’t followed the 4th to the new camp and by the map it’s more than five miles from the National Mall. And, there’s a garden with squashes as feral as they are deer ravaged, and a suburban neighborhood with several houses already found for their solar panels.

So there’s tents sprawled all over the baseball field with just enough organization to make navigating easy, and paths walked into the grass. At one end, well separated from the camping area, is the fire pit. The 4th had dug a notch into the ground and covered it with grates stolen from the park grills. The separation between the cook-fire and camp seems extreme until he realizes that the gap is the width of a strafing pass even though they haven’t seen an Espheni gunship since Charleston. Well, maybe the 4th fought a different war up until now.

Thinking of all the ways that they’ll scatter and run if they hear a ship in the sky takes a bit of the pleasantness out of hanging out by the fire with the others. But there’s sentries and it’s celebration of their safe arrival and he’s got Sara in his arms so he just needs to relax.

As the evening fades to darkness and they let the fire burn down 4th seems much more playful. Despite being on the verge of combat, despite skirmishes daily and sitting on the edges of what may well become a targeting beacon, someone’s got a guitar out, there’s people talking and laughing and leaning together and  _this_ is what he was looking for when he cut and left; people choosing to live between the horrors, not just run between them. It’s got him a little buzzed.

John sees too that he and Sara are not the only ones partnered off. Amanda and Isaiah in his own group are married and he knew that, but here, outside of the fort and away from the eyes of the 2nd and 14th, the 4th has lots of pairs in it. And most of them are within club divisions; they’re gay.

Sara can feel the buzz too, he’s guessing, because she says, “I think we can pull it off. We’re gonna do it.” and then, “I wonder what the city is like now. It’s been-”

John kisses her shoulder. He’d never been to DC as a tourist, never been at all. He’d meant to take Laura and the kids but it had just never happened and then. Well. “We’ll find out tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” Sara makes a quiet sound. “I’m about to call it a night, come with me?”

“Sure.” They pull each other to their feet and wander hand in hand towards the tents, and as they get into the middle of it there’s sounds that clearly resolve into two people having sex. Tents really are an illusion of privacy, and then he realizes with a jolt that both voices are men.

Sara asks, with a bit of flirtatiousness in her voice, “Y’hear that?”

He sure fucking does. His mind has filled in a half dozen ways to make a person sound like that. He squeezes her hand. “Yeah.”

“Y’wanna?”

“How do they have that much energy?”

Sara laughs. “Is being my chauffeur that exhausting?”

“Growing bones takes a lot of energy,” He says deadpan and she laughs again. “’sides, I want you all to myself. Don’t wanna share, not even the sounds that you make.”

“You can’t just  _say_ that.” Sara groans, shaking his hand off of hers so that she can grab his ass.

“Oh, I  _can_ .”

“Well, I don’t care if they hear  _you_ , so come on.” She tugs him with her, hand in his back pocket and he follows eagerly.

DC is built in rings. Not intentionally, it’s just what happens to an ever expanding city over time. The 4th is taking everyone from John’s group who wants to go on a tour of the city- or what’s left of it. They started out in the suburbs and carefully made their way down broken boulevards and side streets through layers of universities and suburbs and overgrown parks. John is still somehow expecting the city to loom up ahead of them with square edges and glass like it does in the pictures.

It does not.

They have, until now, avoided cities and the centers of them. The destruction is breathtaking; they’re used to the suburban areas with all the damage of people and time. Broken windows, downed trees, upside-down cars.

This is different; this is a dead place. Worse than the moon because the moon has always been cold and empty, and this used to be full of people, and rats, and weeds between paving stones, and cherry trees, and now it has been scattered like a box carelessly left open and upended.

It worsens as they work their way into the city center. It’s slow going; the electric cars are adequately capable on the gentle ruin of abandoned highways but they were never meant for the broken asphalt slabs left behind when the Espheni pulled the water mains and power lines up like so much spaghetti through sauce. They have to leave the cars behind and finish the journey on foot.

Buildings have holes punched in them, masonry and concrete fallen and scattered and swept up into a mound of a wall that stretches as many blocks as they care to walk. There’s entire buildings pushed into it, flares of red brick in among the grey, and the ground outside the wall is scraped flat and bare. Everything has been heavily scrapped by the Espheni as they slurped up all the metal that they could find, wires and pipes and girders pulled out of buildings like pieces of string cheese. What’s left standing in any capacity has been burned, rivers of rain washed soot streaking the pavement or standing in greasy sandy black puddles with nowhere else to go.

Enos and half a dozen other members of the 4th Maine are escorting about the same number of people from John’s group on this little jaunt, which will take them approximately all day. Not all of them are fighters, and the risk versus knowledge acquisition limited the number of people who came with them. And, much of the 4th is preparing for the eventual arrival of Mason and Wolf and after that, the assault on the queen.

Being this close to the wall has John giddy, liquid fear under his tongue and black hornets overhead. He keeps ducking, it’s making Sara and Eric and Isaiah skittish, and it’s damn hard to tell what Maggie’s thinking these days. The 4th seems unconcerned; alert yes, and radioing back when a large flight goes by but not even reaching for their weapons unless a hornet comes below three stories up.

It’s impressive, and John is very interested to know where they got that discipline from.

“They don’t seem to care if there’s less than twenty of us. They’ll pick off lone humans of course but groups this size.” Enos shrugs. “Enough of a threat to not bother with, I guess. I’d love to know what their orders are.”

John shrugs. There’s no way to tell what the Espheni are gonna do until they do it. “What have you been dealing with up til now?”

“Mostly areal stuff. Battleships for the first year and then after that, the hornets. They seem to love standing water; everything larger than a drain culvert north of the Mason-Dixon has eggs in it, it seems like.” Enos grimaces. “We go fishing when we see ‘em. They make pretty mediocre eating so mostly we slash em open and leave them to dry out.”

“It’s pretty disgusting.” One of the younger guys offers. John thinks his name is Micah but he can’t see the tag on his vest from this angle.

Eric mutters, “Yeah, I fucking bet.”

Micah laughs, “They’re about the size of golfballs. World’s worst caviar.”

Enos heads them off, “So what’s your experience?”

“Well- the swarm we mentioned, and the glue fog but mostly we’ve been dealing with skitters and the occasional overlord.”

“Hold on.” Maggie says abruptly and everyone goes on alert but there’s nothing. A moment later there’s the characteristic hum of hornets coming towards them. They’re coming in low.

“What’s-” Eric starts.

“Rifles.” Enos orders. His people are ready practically by the end of the word, John’s people are slower. John’s trying to figure out what’s going on with Maggie, because her spikes have just lit up.

“Don’t shoot.” She says.

“Oh what the  _hell_ .” Micah retorts.

One hornet comes careening down out of the group- the others are flying but this one is falling. It gets control of itself only to fly directly into a wall with a sickening crunch. Maggie yelps and curls in on herself as her spikes dim out.

Micah fires before Enos gives the order and the flight comes down around them like birdshot turkeys. Not all of the downed hornets are still, so John draws his knife and starts cutting wings and puncturing skulls.

Behind him, Sara’s voice. She sounds worried. “Maggie?”

“Tried to get their orders.” Maggie sounds wry and he looks over at her. Sara is crouched in front of her. Maggie sniffs and tries to wipe her face but only succeeds in smearing the streak of blood from her nose all over her cheek and hand. “Easier to shoot them,” she says with a shrug.

“Someone wanna explain what just happened?” Enos asks tightly.

Maggie waves. “Hi, I’m Maggie. I’m partially telepathic and strong enough to throw a car due to an Espheni medical intervention that I didn’t ask for. Mostly I shoot things.”

The 4th does not untense _at all_. “How do we know that you aren’t a spy or something?”

Maggie lifts her bloody hand. “Red blood, and it’s really obvious when I’m under control. I glow, for fuck’s sake. Rest of the time it’s just me.”

She hauls herself to her feet. “Let’s go.”

Enos’ suspicious look has only somewhat faded. “Yeah, okay.”

John wants to have a look over the wall himself but Enos refuses because it’s only safe to send one person to sneak up at a time and he’d need a guard. So Sara goes instead, and whispers that she’ll tell him later, and then Maggie goes to have a look.

After that, they return to camp. It’s later afternoon by the time they arrive and they’re greeted by good news. One of the solar power houses is online, so they bring the cars there immediately to charge on the last remaining bit of sun.

Two cars, two drivers, Sara and John almost self select to be the ones to handle the task. The day is almost perfect for holding hands on the walk back but they must remain alert and apart and John itches with the urge to grab her anyway. “So what did you see?”

Sara makes a contemplative sound. “Enos said they were working on maps and those’ll probably be more helpful than-. Well, it’s worse than the valley that we investigated. I can’t guess at the numbers in there but it’s organized in a way that makes the valley look like. I dunno, an accident, like they didn’t intend to establish something there. They sure as fuck meant to establish something here.”

That one had always been weird to him. Not much reason to dwell on it after they’d poisoned the valley but Matt had described the Espheni re-education camps and a military operation organized enough to pull that off even if they were using human labor to do it didn’t seem to match up the chaos and shit in the valley. Or the technology involved in spaceflight, even if the ships themselves are some kind of bio-mechanical pseudo-living things themselves. Or the defense grid towers.

“I saw at least three warships, and there’s a lot of low construction in there. Paper wasps but with steel, man, I don’t know.”

She’d gone up to the edge of the wall three times, John’s heart clutched tight each time.

“It’s the organization that’s got me. I haven’t really seen that before.” She shrugs. “We gotta verify the queen before I’ll agree to going in there with an assault of any kind.”

“Yeah,” John agrees, wondering how much he should say about Boston. She’d been spared some of the nightmare but there’s something about living in the skyline covering shadow of alien infrastructure that changes a man. “Boston- well. They’d built over the entire north side of the bay. We could see it over the water, from the other side even. They’ve always had the capabilities to organize if they’re not showing it.”

Sara sticks her hand out for him and he catches it quickly. The camp is up ahead and they’re in the oversights of the sentries now. She squeezes his hand. “It’s not gonna be easy.”

“No, no it’s not.”

As evening falls, everyone has clustered up around the fire; community and food. John is tucked into Sara’s arms because otherwise his stupid arm would be in the way. Enos casually waves at them from the other side of the hot grating. “Enjoy your day out on the city?”

“It’s not quite like I imagined it would be.” John says wryly. Before or after. He knows that they didn’t see everything today and that he’s working with incomplete information but he’s still preoccupied with the magnitude of the fortification. Even after Mason and Wolf and all of their people arrive, they’re still just people with rifles and no air support scaling a wall that stretches far up over their heads.

“It’s certainly changed since the last time I was here.” Sara says like it’s only the seasons that have changed.

“Yeah, you don’t really get used to it,” Enos shrugs. “We’ll be sending a group out tomorrow to look for the queen.”

“Thought you woulda tried to see her when you arrived?”

“Today’s the first day that we’ve been able to get close without it being a big deal. We  _might_ be ready to surveil them now.”

“Fair enough. Who’s going on it?”

“Myself, Lou, Micah, and Joelle are leading. There’ll be another group behind us as support- if you want to send some people along with us to get the lay of the land a bit better, this would be a good opportunity.”

John tilts his head back against Sara’s shoulder. “Carly and Eric- and Anthony, do you think? Oh, Maggie.”

“Maggie only if I’m going.” Sara speaks to Enos, “We’ll ask.”

“I don’t want you to go,” John says very quietly.

Sara kisses the side of his head. “I know, babe.”

“What’s the deal with Maggie and what’s the other kid’s name, Ben?” Enos asks.

John shrugs. “She’s a survivor. He’s a Mason brat. They can both be taken under control by overlords- physically and mentally. It’s the only way we have to communicate with the Espheni directly but it’s really rough on them.”

Sara adds, “Her controlling the hornets- that’s new. Neither of them have ever done that before.”

“When they’re under control, can they be turned against us or used as sleeper agents?”

It’s the obvious question but John still hates it. “The spikes in their necks glow when they’re under control. It’s not very subtle, as you saw earlier. They can be used against us but so far an overlord has to be within killing distance for it to work. Unlike with the skitters and black hornets, it seems to need to be nearly line of sight between them for it to work.” He shrugs. “We don’t know the full extent of their capabilities, and Maggie and Ben may have different capabilities. Ben has been spiked nearly three times longer than Maggie.”

“Huh.” Enos considers this for a while. “I’d prefer if she didn’t get close to the wall until we have a more complete picture of her capabilities.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Sara offers, “but when she volunteers for missions, that’s between you and her.”

“Gotchya.” Enos nods. “So you don’t- what’s your command structure like? If we wanted to borrow some of your people for a mission, who do I talk to? How do you decide who goes on missions?”

Sara laughs. “Whoever wants to do something poses it to the entire group and people who want to be involved volunteer.”

“But you speak for all of them when you’re dealing with Mason?”

“I run my damn mouth and piss off Mason and always have done. Sara and Carly run the show as much as I do. We figure out everything collectively at meal times as best we can. Well-.” John pauses. “It’s probably best to go through me or Sara when trying to borrow people so that we all know what’s going on.”

Sara continues, “Tell me, _how_ do you do it with so many people?”

“Do you recall how I said that we’re actually two clubs working together? That’s not _quite_ true. As you may have guessed by now, the Centaurs are a gay men’s club, and the Moving Violations are a lesbian club. Each club retains its own political structure and customs. Before the invasion, both clubs were part of a leather fetish organization- which I was on the board of. So we kept that superorganization, just downsized for speed to keep us together. In practice, it shakes out a little differently. I do most of our tactics and military leadership, Tyler and B keep us fed, and Row organizes our medics and engineers. And Meatball is our general Social Officer; he makes sure that everyone is getting along and moderates disagreements. He belongs to both clubs on a technicality.” Enos shrugs. “We have all of our discussions in front of our people and open it for comment through the club leadership after. It works pretty well.”

John’s nodding along as Enos talks. There’s a lot of information in there, some not unexpected but it is still strange to hear it so brazenly confirmed. John grouches, “Damn, I wish we had something like that back before I split from Mason. Wish he fucking talked to people before haring off on every new quest.”

“Cheers to that,” Enos agrees. “Wolf is dangerous, too. We showed up what, two days after the shitshow? and he’d already latched onto Mason. I could pull rank on him but I want to leave their command structure intact unless he makes himself a problem.”

Enos smiles crookedly. “Anston might get to it first though, she seems to be building her own coalition within Wolf’s forces and I know she was talking to Row before we pulled out about converting some vehicles to syngas.”

“Independent of Wolf’s questions, I assume?”

“Yep.”

“Well that’s just _fascinating_.” John drawls. Another player in the mix isn’t gonna make this any easier, but one sympathetic to Enos and himself-. He should check in with her after Mason-Wolf coalition arrives. “Politically, Mason’s lost me, Weaver, Anthony, and Maggie so it’s just him and his family deciding things there now, which is pretty uncomfortable.”

Enos nods. “Yeah, we’re gonna have to be careful with him.”


	17. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slice o' camp life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lola, this one's for you. thanks for the comment!

The morning starts at the crack of dawn with gunfire at a swarm of black hornets flying overhead. No causalities or injuries, just corpses to drag out of camp before the cooking fires are even stoked. It sets a tense mood for the day because it means that even at this distance, the camp is not safe.

After breakfast, the scouting crew forms up. All of the people that Enos said, and Eric and Carly besides. They’re two up on motorcycles because the cars are all out of charge. John’s worried about their agility if they have to flee but they seem confident and anyway, one of the few trikes in the motorcycle gang is towing an empty trailer because they’re gonna have to drag the canoe on a skidpad nearly two miles to get it to the riverside. John’s never tried it but he’s pretty sure that a trailer is worse for handling than any passenger.

A second group was going to go up and investigate the more northwestern of the two nearby hospitals to see if there’s anything left but with the rough start to the morning and nearly a third of their people on the mission to sight the queen, they’ve elected to stay with the camp and guard it. Some of them are tearing into the rec-center building to see if there’s anything useful in it or if there’s any place with little enough mold in it to not be an immediate hazard to their health. It’s not looking good, John can’t help, and Row is rattling around camp in frustration that her mission was put on hold and he’s gotta get out of there and do something useful before they all go crazy from the tension.

Sara finds him before he can get into trouble but he heads her off, “I heard there was another possible power house, I want to go work on that.”

“I was just about to say-” She laughs when he dips his head in apology. “Sam wanted to go and we should grab someone from the 4th who knows where it is so we’re not just fuckin around.”

“I mean, we  _could_ be fuckin around.” He jokes.

She punches him gently in the shoulder on his good side. “I’d feel bad what with everyone else working. C’mon.”

The other solar panel house that the 4th had found for them had been described as being in really rough condition. It’s bad enough that John seriously considers calling the attempt at getting it back online off and seeking out another house but that means walking an unknown number of miles through largely unscouted territory and they’re just a group of four people. While he doesn’t know Celeste well at all, he knows that Sam doesn’t skew towards combat like he and Sara do so it’s better to play it safe.

The house itself has tree damage. It’s mostly on the front porch, but it’s the kind of porch that’s got a real roof overhanging it and the collapse tore out part of the front of the house, leaving a gaping hole open to the elements. It’s not listing yet, but won’t be long and John is half tempted to say that they should unmount the panels and drag them back to a safer structure but it’s better to have a backup place to charge the cars. That’s why they’re doing this.

So they pull their masks and scarves up over their noses and head in through the broken side door, gingerly pressing the floor with a stick to test for softness before stepping. And it’s all for nought because they haven’t even found the access to the control panel for the solar panels when Sam steps too close to Sara and they both go through the floor with a shout and a lot of cursing.

John has to resist every impulse to rush over and try to pull Sara out; they know that the floor is weak now and there’s no guarantee that he won’t go through too. “Are both of you okay?”

“Yeah!” Sara calls back, followed shortly by Sam. “I think so!”

It looks like the fault was standing between the same two floor joists. It’s not reassuring. “Are you gonna be able to get back out?”

“Hold on.”

There’s the crack of a lighter and then the dull wavery light of a candle coming up through the hole. It slowly moves around as Sam surveys the basement. “There’s stairs but man, they do not look good. And some boxes and miscellaneous furniture. I don’t think we’re _fucked_ but this isn’t exactly great.”

“Is there anything you want from us?”

“Just stay up there. I think the control panel is down here anyway.” Sara calls back.

“Okay. I think we’re gonna case the rest of the house and make sure that there’s no more surprises. And hopefully find a way to brace the floor here.” John says.

“Sure!”

Celeste has been watching the back and forth. “And just leave them down there?”

“We’ll shout if we need anything!” Sara calls back.

“See?”

“I guess.” Celeste shrugs.

They set off again through the first floor of the house, staying a cautious two floor joists away from each other. The first floor has a kitchen table, the kind with leaves that come out as planks, and a coffee table with a plate glass top. The particle board wood of the coffee table has been destroyed but the glass is only dirty.

“That’s gonna be heavy as fuck.” Celeste comments when John eyes it.

“Yeah. It’s probably the sturdiest thing in here but if we drop it, it’s gonna go right through and take us with it.”

“Might do even if we  _don’t_ drop it.”

“Let’s keep going and see if there’s anything else.”

There isn’t anything else worth their time so they head up the stairs to the second floor, staying as close to the warping wall as they dare, one step and one person at a time. 

Just as John sets foot on the landing, he sees something move in one of the doorways and instantly he’s praying that it’s an animal. Squirrel, cat, bird that got in, there are so many things that it could be. So many things. His hand goes to his pistol anyway. He hisses back to Celeste and then has to move off of the landing so that she can get the rest of the way up the stairs before they engage with whatever it is.

John moves towards the ajar doorway first; he’s the first one up and there’s no space for Celeste to pass by him in the narrow hall. Pistol held low and there are  _so many_ things that it could be and it’s a skitter with three legs on the collapsed bed and the rest on the floor and tree branches protruding through the hole in the wall and he shouts and fires at it and the recoil is jarring and then he’s staggering to the side so that Celeste can get through and it’s three more shots between them before it stops moving.

“Fuck.” Celeste says quietly.

“Fuck.” John agrees, desperately shaking out his left arm. It feels like the recoil rearranged his shoulder again; it’s tingling badly now.

“Well. There’s three more rooms up here.”

They go through each of the rest of the rooms with Celeste in the lead now. There’s no more skitters, and nothing that they could haul back down to brace the floor. John goes through the bathroom cabinet and turns up an unopened toothpaste, but everything else including the first aid kit in its little zippered ‘waterproof’ pouch is too full of water and bugs to be worth touching.

Back on the first floor, they are greeted by Sara standing on something so that her head and shoulders are up through the hole in the floor and her pistol in her hands. “The hell happened up there?”

“Skitter. We’re okay. It probably came up the downed tree and into the house before we were even here.”

“Whew. Glad to hear it.” The relief is evident in her tone.

“How’s it going down there?”

“It’s the same model as the other house but there’s so much damp down here that I don’t think we’re gonna be able to get it back online. If we can get to the panels on the roof, we might want to try snatching them and hope to turn up a working controller somewhere else.”

“Yeah, I don’t fancy trying to drag a dead skitter out of here very much either.”

“Gimme a sec.” Sara ducks back down into the basement and is saying something to Sam.

John turns to Celeste. “Planks?”

“Sure.”

John and Celeste carefully ferry the planks from the kitchen table back into the living room where the hole is and lay them across the joists on both sides of the hole.

Sara pops up again in a moment and sees what they’ve done. “Nice. Sam agrees that we should cut our losses here and go back to camp. Get off the floor so we can get out, please.”

Celeste edges her way back outside, John following a respectful distance behind. Sam comes out next, and Sara last. They stand outside blinking in the sun as Sara combs spiderwebby leaves out of her hair with her fingers for a moment before giving up. “Fuckit, let’s go.”

They’re sitting on the mossy brick steps of the rec center when the scouting party returns. Sara is on the step below him with her shoulders between his knees, and he is brushing the remainder of the cobwebs out of her hair. Well, he was, and he’s now been interrupted from playing with her hair.

And the scouting party has returned whole, which is a huge relief by itself, and they have returned triumphant with news of the queen and what the fortifications along the coastline are like. Everyone clusters up around the fire grates to listen to them tell a disjointed chaotic tale of getting down and across the river, and back again.

It comes out in bits and pieces and the gist of it is that the coastline is pretty much entirely unprotected. Heavily polluted, yes, but the Espheni don’t seem to be expecting to defend in that direction- which sort of makes sense because the humans haven’t had any significant waterborne armaments since about two days into the invasion.

They saw the queen, too, or at least a never-before-seen shape of Espheni with an entourage, but not well enough to get solid information. It’s  _possible_ , is the important thing.

And now they have to tell Mason and Wolf and keep their heads down for nearly two whole weeks.

John isn’t looking forward to it, not the least of which is that he’s the one who gets to talk to Mason on the radio about it.

There’s an air of celebration but underneath it there’s a grim determination. It’s real now, they’re committed and everyone is determined to be one of the survivors. They have to be.


	18. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now we bide our time

The two weeks start out with that same determined energy and by the fourth day John is getting antsy that everything is going too well. The people going up to the wall to spy on the Espheni are all coming back with information and without injuries. The groups clearing paths through the city so that they can use their vehicles to their fullest capabilities are having a normal amount of skirmishes. Sara had ridden him hard the night before, even.

So it’s almost a relief when Eric and Micah go missing.

There’s a mad scramble, him and Enos asking around trying to find out if anyone knows something but also trying to not panic anyone in case it’s nothing. By late morning all they have is that Micah’s motorcycle and both of their weapons are gone, but all of their things are still there.

“It looks like they mean to come back.” John offers. Eric is too smart to just leave his stuff behind. And they’ve been gone for a couple of hours, without food supplies. There’s a decent chance that they’ll return soon if they return at all. “And we haven’t seen any unusual Espheni activity. If they haven’t returned by midafternoon, we go looking for them?”

Enos frowns, then nods. “We’ll ask for volunteers when the work parties return with the cars.”

“I don’t like leaving them out there for so long but it sounds like a plan.” John nods. The cars are quieter and attract less attention than the motorcycles.

Enos shrugs, “Micah’s a competent kid but he should really know better than to sneak off this late in the game.”

“I figure they’re out doing something insanely reckless that will somehow get us vital information that we didn’t know that we needed.” John shrugs. That’s how it seems to work out for him pretty often. “It’s what I would do. And if we send people after them, it puts more people at risk. We’ve got no idea where they went, and it could be pretty far with a motorcycle.”

He feels like he’s unnecessarily justifying himself by the time he stops talking.

Enos glances at him. “First time making this kind of decision?”

“We- left people at Sara’s house to take care of it and the farm that we found.” John evades.

“We won’t know until we know.” Enos says it in a way that John knows is supposed to be comforting, but that’s it, isn’t it. They just have to wait until they can do something.

“That’s the worst part.” John complains.

“Yeah.” Enos slaps him on the shoulder with somewhat forced joviality. “Get yourself on a work crew. It’ll help.”

It almost does. One of the groups working on the rec center needs someone to pull the debris that they’ve collected out of the building. He’s a glorified mule, with a rope tied around his waist to enable him to pull the tarp that the debris is being piled onto. Between loads there is enough time for him to rattle around his skull, worrying about if it was the right decision or not. Everything is so up to chance and he doesn’t know shit to make a call one way or the other. He just has to trust that Eric and Micah will be as reliable as he and Enos want them to be.

_Be the leader._

Fuck you, Mason,  _this sucks_ .

An hour or two before they’re expecting the work parties to return, Eric and Micah sneak into camp. John doesn’t see them because he and Anthony are combating a mush of rotting drop ceiling tiles and it’s Enos who comes to find him and fuckit, everyone goes with him because nobody wants to be dealing with rotting ceiling tiles.

They all cluster up around the campfires to hear Micah and Eric tell their tale, and John starts prepping corn to roast as he listens because that’ll take a while to cook and evening is coming up.

They’d ridden down the other side of the Potomac on Micah’s motorcycle. With some scouting around along the way, they had found a serviceable kayak which they pulled down into the river and crossed in the shadow of the shattered Arlington bridge. There was a copse of trees on one side of the bridge, now seriously overgrown and expanded, through which they crept up towards the Lincoln Memorial. The inner circle of roads there was too torn up and exposed to cross so they had stayed in the trees to watch for a while.

John’s looking at them, unable to decide if he’s gonna tell Eric off, or congratulate them both. Micah is making agreeing sounds as Eric tells most of the story.

They had not expected to see much activity at the back of the monument; it’s just a face of marble with pillars containing a walkway. For a while they saw only skitters- perhaps a patrol- and then a handful of overlords. At that distance, grey skin and uniform against dirtied marble, it was hard to tell how many. Five or six.

The overlords disappeared around the corner and into the shadow of the overhang for a while. Long enough later for the shadows to have shifted, the overlords returned. Now they have surrounded a larger figure. It moved with a jolting gait on at least four legs, maybe six. The rearmost pair were larger than the rest; they describe it as being like a grasshopper but if it was a praying mantis. Its head was higher than the overlords- that puts it at well over ten feet tall.

If it’s not the queen, it’s certainly a new and horrible kind of Espheni that they’ll have to be ready for. But the wave of skitters that came through with it, crawling over the walls and zooming across the torn up ground around the monument suggested a guard.

So they have to assume that it’s the queen.

It’s all good information. It’s knowledge that they needed. And they’d gone in without anyone to cover them on the other bank and nobody knowing where they were.

“Hey Eric.”

“Yeah?”

“Good work. I mean it. But if you sneak off like that again without telling anyone where you’re going, you’re-” And then John bites his tongue, Eric and Enos look like they’re trying not to laugh.

“You’re not my real dad.” Eric offers up and Enos loses it laughing.

John cracks a grin. “I wasn’t gonna tell you no, but. If we know where you’re going and you don’t come back from there, well. That’s information we can use too.”

That sobers everyone up right quick. John sorta feels bad about it.

“Would you do it again?” Enos asks.

“Yeah.” Eric says immediately. Micah smirks and looks at his boots to cover it.

“Good. Expect to be asked to do that again.” Enos says.

“Sure.” Eric agrees, but Micah says, “Sir.”

Enos smiles. “Good work, kid.”

Micah sort of laughs, and then Eric rescues him by towing him away towards another of their friends, presumably to embellish their exploits.

The two scouting parties return then and they have to be debriefed and everything rapidly descends into chatter and chaos.

Later, John and Enos are sitting by the low campfires, just chatting. Sara is off figuring something out with Celeste and Maggie. It is sort of a relief to finally have a chance to get to know Enos after working with him and his group for nearly two whole weeks. One or the other of them has always been doing something; Enos is especially driven but finally things have stabilized for a moment long enough to just sit around.

Enos starts from an earlier conversational split. “Sara’s house? I thought Mason was nomadic.”

“Oh,  _he_ is. Sara was a lone survivor for nearly a year and a half before I dragged her into this fucking mess.”

Enos whistles, impressed. “We run into lone survivors occasionally, but most of them prefer to stay that way.”

“She said that she got lonely. Which, fair enough. I’d have gone batshit fucking insane if I was left alone for that long.” John shrugs. “We’re planning on going back to her house after this.”

Enos graciously doesn’t point out the possibility that they won’t make it. “All of your people, too?”

“Yeah,” John shrugs. “We’ve got nowhere else to go and it’s our best chance. We’ll strip all of the orchards and farms that we found on the way up on the way back down and hopefully that will tide us through winter. We didn’t exactly have time to provision before-” John trails off.

“I was worried about your apparent lack of provisions in Norfolk. Mason’s too. I’m glad to hear that you have a plan.”

“Mason is still depending on warehouse finds and scavenging for food,” John says quietly. “There’s nobody really doing any planning. Not more than a few days at a time.”

“Jesus. People are gonna starve.” Enos stares into the fire for a moment, shaking his head.

“Yeah.” John sighs. They’ve got friends still with Mason but even with their plan to harvest on the way back south, they’ll hardly have enough supplies to support themselves through winter nevermind adding _more_ people. “You have a fair number of people. How are you managing? How’d you get all of this together?”

“We’ve got- like a country club, but some rich fuck’s private estate, you know. 10 or 15 square miles. We were on a club outing when the invasion started. Sat up top the hill half naked and scared like I’ve only been once before and watched Portland burn. The next day we went in- Portland, Augusta, Bangor, but the roads were fucked- and tried to get everyone who wasn’t on the outing out. Some members fled to us on their own and we picked up a few strays along the way. The place we’d rented for the weekend wasn’t very good for long term stay with that many people but this estate turned out to be unoccupied after the staff fled. So we moved in and have been there ever since, slowly converting the grounds to farm and reforesting the rest.”

“Did you ever hear from the owner?”

Enos laughs. “Sure did! He showed up two months later with a Porsche and a machete and tried to make himself our king but I don’t have too much patience for petty tyrants and people who use faggot as a slur.” Enos pauses. “I shot him and we planted raspberries over where we buried him.”

John nods. He can’t fault the logic there. “How’d you decide to kill him?”

“It was pretty spur of the moment. It was him or us, or it was gonna be him and some other poor fuck hacked up by that machete.” Enos looks grim. “We’ve pretty much avoided having a repeat since.”

“Shit, yeah.” John agrees, but he’s in free fall, piecing something else together. “Are all of you really gay?”

“More or less.”

“Y’all don’t keep it much of a secret.”

“What? Oh, you’re outnumbered.” Enos says very casually.

“I think Eric’s up to something with Micah.”

“They’re grown men.”

“If he wants to go with the Centaurs, are you gonna let him?”

“Are you?”

“You know, I didn’t split from Mason just so  _I_ could tell other people what to do.” John sasses back.

“What happened with you and Mason?”

John groans dramatically. “What didn’t happen? He’s an asshole.”

“You act like he’s your schoolyard ex sometimes.” Enos prods at him.

John flinches, wondering if Enos could see the marks that Julian had left on him. If that’s why Enos had picked him out to work with. But how could he have known? John shakes his head, trying to cover his initial reaction. “Right. People keep dying. I _get_ that this is a combat situation but so many of these deaths were preventable. Or all the times we were starving. Or the time he straight up surrendered because the Espheni told him they’d let us walk free if we went to Georgia. Guess how that fucking went.”

“It was getting worse so I demanded that he clean up his act and think about the consequences of his decisions and he threw me out of camp. I didn’t really mean to start my own group but a bunch of other people left after that and then we found the Device. So here we are because winning this is more important than-. ”

“Someone has to reign him in and Weaver sure as fuck can’t do it anymore. I’m so fucking afraid that he’s gonna lay claim to America with our blood.” He finishes bitterly.

“Well.” Enos smiles, and the dangerous tone is back in his voice. “I’ve been protesting the American government since before Vietnam, so I don’t think one man will pose much difficulty.”

“You must be pretty happy with all this, then.” John waves his hand at the general destruction.

“I had a dream of- settling down. Husband, dog, adopt a kid. Prosaic shit.” Enos shakes his head sadly but it doesn’t mask the bitter angry edge to his voice. “It was denied to me because I was poor, because the government that so many of us unwillingly gave our lives for refused to acknowledge us after, because of AIDs, and now this. It’s still such a tempting fantasy but here? That’s just digging in the ruins of the past to push the future forward.”

John nods.

“I’ve survived the end of the world- twice. I’ll survive this too. But none of us know how to survive this long term, to  _start over_ , like this. You can feel it too, can’t you? The past is running out. We’re gonna have to stand on our own soon.”

“Yeah,” John says quietly, “yeah.”

“Who here knows how to forge iron? Who here knows how to raise a house and do it without nails? That knowledge is gone and the resources depleted. We’re starting with less than the colonists that Mason likes to jabber on about.”

“Hah. Yeah, I wish he wouldn’t do that quite so much. It always precedes us starving again.” John sighs. “I don’t want to lead all of these people.”

“The allure of settling down.” Enos chuckles. “But you can’t, that’s why you’re here.”

“Right back atchya,” John grouses. “Would you? If you could?”

“Don’t think I’d know how. I’ve been fighting for too long.” Enos sighs. “I’m old, John, when my heart finally gives up, that’s it for me.”

“Yeesh.” The future feels like it’s stretching away from him into the blackness of night in all directions. So many possibilities, so much chance that they can’t control guiding outcomes and they’re gonna bottle it all up and take a swing at the hornet’s nest. Only time will tell if it’s a victory or a catastrophe. 


	19. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang's all here!

After that things settle down again. They follow through on the plans that they’d made in Norfolk and on the ground here. Every day almost everyone is out of the camp working on something. A group or two of about ten people each will take a car and go out into the wasteland of the city to observe the Espheni base, and to build sally points and retreats into the rubble. While every person in every group is armed for combat, about a third of each group’s sole task is to guard the others. The rate of skirmishes has been going up and Enos wants everyone fully comfortable with combat.

Row’s missions to the hospitals are more disheartening. There were three hospitals, each about the same distance away as the crow flies. The northwestern one is still there but the huge plate glass windows hadn’t survived. Easy to get into but so incredibly unstable that it’s not worth it to even try. The northeastern one, being an overall shorter building, had survived somewhat better. The one halfway to the Espheni compound is a smear of red brick rubble.

Row doesn’t return empty handed, but she says that they’d have better luck scavenging an outlying pharmacy.

It’s sobering news. Most pharmacies had been cleaned out of essentials in the first 5 days and everything else by five weeks.

It means a lot more work. Going house by house looking for sealed containers is dangerous and slow and they are by no means the first party of looters to go through the area. It also means longer range parties to look for any plants that anyone thinks that they may be able to use. It’s guesswork- what could grow nearby, what’s in season, what survived the suburbanization around the city. What they can identify.

Willow tree bark turns out to be easy, and after live trials, effective although in limited supply. Yarrow turns out to be a decorative plant in addition to a native one and it’s hiding around neighborhoods and office buildings. And red clover is so far out of season that nobody is confident in their ability to  distinguish it from any other clover in a lawn.

It’s much slower going than they’d hoped for, but they still have time.

John continues to spend most of his time working in and around the campsite instead of going out to the wall with the construction and combat groups. Sara says that him healing is more important than having another pair of hands at the front line, and he whines about it and plays like he’s been sent to detention even though he knows she’s right. Enos too turns out to spend a lot of time at the campsite; he’s not needed in the field either. Their collective group is largely autonomous and self directing and their goals are clear. There’s solar houses to scout and repair, campsites to prepare, water to store, plants to dry and keep as medicines. John and Enos end up handling most of that, shuttling bundles of plants from the drying screens to the rec building store house and arranging the new plants that Row’s scavenging teams are bringing back to dry. It keeps them busy enough, especially when a team brings back game too.

John thinks that they must look ridiculous; two men sitting in the sun on a low walled embankment tying herbs into bundles, both of them with knives in their belts and pistols at their hip. But with Mason and Wolf are arriving in a day or so, the only thing that’s truly absurd is that they’ll be going into battle in a few days after that with knockoff aspirin as their most potent pain reliever and no way to clean anything other than sticking it in boiling water.

And so they work in silence and chat in equal amounts. Enos has been becoming more taciturn as the days count down while the rest of the 4th seems to be working about the same and playing harder.

“You don’t seem excited,” John comments.

“Trouble’s coming.”

“Mason, or the battle?”

“Yeah.” Enos agrees.

“I had a boyfriend.” John says abruptly. Boyfriend is too serious for what he means, lover and fling are too fun and he doesn’t know what Julian was to him other than a pain in the ass- “I mean. For a couple of weeks, anyway. Mason doesn’t care about that.”

He doesn’t need to tell Enos this, but from the way the 4th acts, maybe Enos will understand the things that John cannot explain.

Enos quirks an eyebrow at him. “The only one you’ve got tension with is Mason and Mason is, sorry, _really_ straight.”

“No, he is. He’s not here.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to him?”

John fishmouths a little, damning himself. Shakes his head. He doesn’t want to explain being dead again. He doesn’t want to explain any of this now, it’s worse to say it out here in the plain light of day than it was to try to explain to Sara the first time. “It’s insane, you wouldn’t believe it.”

Enos makes a wry sound. “We’re in the middle of a literal alien apocalypse with infantry that look like jacked up spiders. Try me.”

“The Espheni make monsters out of the species that they conquer. We’ve killed two legged skitters.” Enos is looking at him in horrified sympathy. “No. These- Julian is from some horrible mirror world. Julian chose to be a monster and revels in it. Mason- the deaths he’s responsible for are indirect. Julian, they’re by his hand and by his plan and they’re the cost of doing business.”

“…mirror world?” Enos does not believe him, which is fair.

John isn’t even sure where to start. “About a 8 months ago, more or less, you might have seen a really bright flare in the night sky? Around the moon?”

“You know what that was?” Enos seems surprised.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” John pauses. “Me and Mason’s actual hellspawn child flew a captured Espheni cruiser to the moon in order to blow up their power station there. We succeeded, and we both died in the attempt.”

“So who the  _fuck_ are you.” Enos asks flatly.

“Just some asshole who’s really hard to keep down. I bleed red, same’s you.” John laughs bitterly. “When we were staying in Boston, a portal from this nightmare timeline opened and he came through. We were- something, lovers I guess, for a few weeks but I’m pretty sure he seduced me for protection and his own entertainment. Not that I can imagine that he needed _my_ protection, jesus.”

Enos is studying him, waiting for him to go on.

John sighs.  “I got picked up by him when I landed in his world after the moon shot and  _there_ he’s a bloodthirsty immortal god. Lives flow through his hands like water, like sand. I needed his protection, as little as I wanted it. I managed to get myself damn near killed anyway, but not before it put a lot of things about what I was doing here in perspective.”

John feels drained. “He wasn’t like that, here. He used me. There he claimed to be god and he acted like it.”

He’s just stopped. They turn the yarrow over so that it dries evenly.

Eventually Enos breaks the quiet, “That sounds really fucked up. Does Mason know?”

“Fuck no.” John snorts.

“Who does?”

“Sara. Everyone else already thinks I’m a fucking crank, I’m not gonna give them reason to be right.”

Tyler returns then with a deer and damn near half of an herb garden and together the three of them wrestle it up onto the concrete to be butchered before Tyler heads off again.

“Not to be mercenary about it, but do we need to worry about this mirror world?” Enos asks.

John shrugs. “I don’t think so? He can open the portal at will but he doesn’t seem interested in coming here. Probably too peaceful for him or something.” He snorts, “If you see anyone dressed like the 80s and the late 00s had a shitty child who’s driving a car that smells like week old roadkill, just stay the fuck away from them.”

“No, yeah, okay, that seems like the kind of problem that we deal with if it arises.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, thanks for the warning about Mason.”

John wasn’t sure that he’d given a warning, exactly, but if that’s the way Enos wanted to take it then he wouldn’t press the issue. He’d said enough.

The rec center has come a long way from the rotting brick wreck it had been. It is still a rotting brick wreck, but they’ve cleared it out, stripped the floor back to the old composited stone and covered the walls with tarps and wedged wooden shingles into the roof. It’s nearly waterproof and that’s a damn good thing because the night before Mason is supposed to arrive a huge thunderstorm rolls in and by now they’ve got more supplies than they can distribute among individual people’s tents.

Inside it looks like something out of a movie. Firewood stacked against the walls to keep dry and slowly air out and all of their dried plants strung crosswise across the big room on ropes. It looks good. Might even be proofed against the swarm. Reassuring even though it’s probably not really enough.

It’s still raining when he wakes up in the morning. Even though the field they’re camped on is sloped enough for the water to drain off, there’s still a leak in one corner of their tent. Not new news but still tedious and a cranky way to wake up after a restless night of thunder. Sara is still asleep.

John moves everything that isn’t already wet to the higher side of the tent, bails some water out, and goes back to laying on his back and staring at the hidden sky. He’s had three weeks mostly free of politicking and now it’s all coming to an end. He’ll go out later on foot or on the back of someone else’s motorcycle to bring the larger group in and then they’ll get right down to bickering over maps and strategies and philosophies. 

Hopefully it will have stopped raining by then.

Sara rolls against him. “Bleh.”

“Morning.” He smooches her.

Everyone got a late start because of the rain, late enough that Mason considered waiting another day at their current camp because they’d be arriving near dark that night. But their cars are charged and the ground won’t be any drier the next day, so they get going and John joins the group that’s heading over the river to meet them. It’s a larger group than originally planned because everyone’s decided that today is a no work day because of the wet blanket in a sauna humidity.

He goes along on the back of Enos’s bike. Enos had asked him if he knew how to ride and John had just winked. It got Enos to laugh, at least.

John is not sure how he feels about riding bitch to a guy who’s older and smaller than him, but what the fuck ever. Asking to borrow someone’s bike would be weird; he doesn’t know any of them well enough for the answer to be yes.

It’s a pleasant ride to the bridge, whereupon they get swarmed by black hornets the moment they’re out in the open. It forces them down and off of the motorcycles. The hornets can’t lift the motorcycles like they can people; they get most of a circle formed up to take cover inside of and a few people clip themselves to the frames of their motorcycles. After just a few weeks of practice in the rubble of DC, their effectiveness is so much improved. This is a combat group now, not a collection of mostly coordinated civilians. 

As soon as they had appeared, the hornets must get recall orders because after dropping ten or fifteen right out of the air they zoom away. As everyone refills their magazines, John goes around and punctures the skulls of the ones that fell on the bridge. The popping of his knife through the exoskeleton is gross but necessary; the hornets go down when shot but they don’t always die and they’re easier to shove into the river when they don’t struggle.

And then they’re back on the road to the meeting point.

When they reach it, Mason and Wolf and all of their people aren’t there. The day is halfway to dusk and they’d like to be back at camp before the skitters come out in the half light. They spread out across the old overgrown parkway, ever alert, ever cautious and continue down the route Mason is taking up.

Only a few miles further down the road, there they are. A loose group across the entire width of the road, cars scattered among them and a few military vehicles bringing up the rear. The grumble of the large engines is somewhat unsettling after so long with the electric cars and the motorcycles. Mason and Wolf are in the middle front- the motorcycles seem to startle some people but the group is too big to stop so quickly so John hops down as everyone else gets their motorcycles turned around. 

He’s happy to see them, he really is, just as much as the immediate future worries him. 

“Mason! Weaver!” He waves, and then sees behind them, “Anne!”

The group engulfs him and he stays close to Weaver and Anne as they keep walking. “So what kept you?”

Anne replies, “Oh, we had a battle with some hornets. No losses.”

“That’s good to hear. We were attacked too, but they fucked off pretty quickly. No losses on our side, either.”

“That’s pretty weird. We had to kill all of them.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure what that was about. I wonder if you got the same flight that we did?”

Weaver says, “None of them were injured when they showed up and there were a _lot_ of them.”

“Huh, not ours then.”

“I think they mighta noticed that we’re staging a reverse invasion.” Anne suggests. 

Masons tacks on, “If that’s true, we’ll have to move quickly once we have camp set up.”

“I feel like if they were gonna notice, they would have by now. They’ve definitely upped the skirmishes but it’s nothing we haven’t been able to handle.” John shrugs. “We have a lot of intel and a couple of plans to get started with tomorrow.”

“That’s very good.” Wolf agrees.

John doesn’t really want to talk to Wolf, not until tomorrow. He gently snags Weaver and drifts them away from Mason and Wolf.  “Weaver, my old friend, how ya been?”

“Oh-” Weaver vaguely waves the hand that isn’t keeping the rifle strap taut over his shoulder. “Been keeping busy.”

“Sure, busy. C’mon man, the last time we talked, you’d just strangled an overlord and  _then_ things started going downhill.”

Weaver sighs, “Mason’s worse with Wolf.”

“Somehow I am not surprised,” John says dryly. “That’s still not about you.”

“He did a little PR thing with Anne at his shoulder to say that he was taking your comments seriously but nothing really changed.” Weaver sighs. “Why do you care so much?”

“I can’t know how a friend is doing?”

Weaver sighs. “I’m exhausted. Mason can have it, as far as I’m concerned. Whether we win or lose this battle, I’m done. I can’t keep doing this.”

“Shit.” John says sympathetically. He’s been there. He’d still be there if they didn’t have this chance. “You know, you are always welcome at Sara and my’s house. Overwinter with us, chill out for a while.”

“And deal with you bugging me all the damn time?” Weaver jokes weakly.

“I’ll make Mason seem like a good choice by spring. See, everybody wins!”

Weaver snorts. “I’ll consider it.”

“You should.”

“Said I would.”

John changes the topic. “Are you gonna be cool with Maggie?”

Weaver shrugs. “It was probably for the best.”

“Hm.” John doesn’t quite agree with that.

“Hm,  _what_ ?”

“Dude, it was fucked up what she did.”

“She wasn’t the woman I loved.” Weaver says quietly. “She didn’t remember- well, that doesn’t matter. I was pretending that there was nothing wrong.” Weaver falls quiet for a while before getting him back, “Is Maggie gonna be cool with Hal?”

“Fuck if I know, it’s not like we gossip. Sara might know.”

They banter, damn near three months of gossip to catch up on and it carries them all the way to the bridge.

Their conversation turns again to practical matters as they cross the bridge. Everyone is wary of another attack but with this many people, pretty much anything that doesn’t take the bridge out entirely ought to be fairly easy to deal with.

“So, when can we have a look at it?” Mason asks.

“Tomorrow.” John offers. It’s still daylight but they’ll get in around dusk and they still have to set up camp for so many people, get everyone fed and oriented and all that. “We still have work parties going out- we can tag along with one so that you can see what we’ve accomplished and what we’re up against here.”

“There’s still a bit of light left in the day, we could send a small party-” Wolf starts.

John just cuts him off. “The cars need to finish charging and taking a motorcycle is just asking for trouble.”

“Yeah, alright.” Mason sighs. “What’s the camping situation?”

“We’ve expanded the area further north and east into the suburbs where there’s a bit more cover. It’s outside of our regular sentry’s area, so you’ll have to get a few of your people trained up on watch tonight.” John pauses to think. He’s been living like this for long enough that it’s just routine now. “Stay inside the perimeter and don’t shoot at black hornet flights unless they’re coming down into camp. Let the sentries make that call. There’s probably some other stuff, but we’ll figure it out when we get there.”

“Why not shoot down the flights?”

“Frankly? Waste of ammunition. If they aren’t bothering us there’s no need to draw attention to our campsites. A dozen hornets is far easier to take down than a cruiser.” John shrugs. They’ll have to deal with the warships inside the Espheni compound, but that’s a tomorrow problem.

Weaver nods at that.

The groups split up when they approach camp. The armored cargo trucks get stashed in among the buildings around the rec center to hide them somewhat, the cars pick up new drivers and fan out into the surrounding suburbia to find power houses, and everyone left on foot spreads out to set up camp. After two weeks on the road, they have it down to a science and the only thing that’s different is that water sources and raid shelters have already been scouted and secured. 

It takes less than an hour and then they’re all gathering up again to wrangle out who’s on watch and where and get dinner sorted out. It’s good to have everyone back, but it’s interesting to see what’s changed, too. Weaver and Anne are directing a lot of the chaos as the Masons install themselves at the head of the campfire. Hal strides off, presumably to find Maggie in among the 4th. Wolf is still keeping his group separated from the rest of them like the distinction between civilian and soldier means anything anymore. 

John leans against Sara, watching Hal, towing Maggie by her wrist return to the crowd with Celeste trailing after them. “This’ll be interesting.”

Sara makes a noncommittal sound. “I don’t like him.”

“Dunno what she ever saw in him.”

Tensions ratchet up as soon as she hugs Ben in greeting, too, and Weaver takes one look at that and comes over to sit beside John. Weaver says tiredly, “Thank god I can get away from that now.” 

John laughs. “What’s your bet on it?”

Weaver fires back, “Thought we weren’t supposed to bet on people’s love lives.”

“I’m not keeping books anymore,” John shrugs. “Hal gets punched sometime before the big battle.”

“Hm.” Weaver studies the situation for a little while longer. “Shouting match tonight.”

Sara offers, “Celeste punches Hal sometime in the next two days.”

“Come on, you can’t both do that,” Weaver complains.

Sara laughs. “Of course I can!


	20. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drama (with the Ex)

It’s raining again in the morning. John’s restless mood from the previous morning returns; if they have to go into battle in the rain, it will all be so much worse. The rain doesn’t slow the Espheni down, but their people in well worn boots have a much harder time. And frankly, they don’t have the supplies to stay camped here for very long. There’s too many people now and not enough green. Still, dawn and needing to piss force him up and out, first to the edge of camp and then back to the rec center with the banked fire pit still gently glowing under the lobby overhang.

Mason is sitting beside it, feet up on the edge, looking worn and grey.

He doesn’t particularly want to talk to Mason this early. If there were still coffee, he’d need coffee before this. “Mornin’”

Mason glances up at him. “Morning.”

John squats down beside the fire pit to start opening the coals up so that it will be ready for when he hauls some wood out from the rec center.

“Nice place you’ve got here.”

John grunts acknowledgement that Mason said something.

“You know, I’d hoped you’d be here, at the end of it all.”

“Wouldn’t miss it. Couldn’t, really.”

“Why? I heard you had a good thing going.”

“I live here too, jackass.”

Mason snorts, “As if that were reason enough before.”

“Isn’t it?” John asks. “You gotta weigh the short term and the long term. Can’t be at the end of things if I’ve already died. Can’t start over if everyone dies. It’s not living if we’re pretending that we’re not hiding. I’m a selfish asshole and we all know it, but you still have people that I care about and god help me I won’t let them die here, now, for no goddamn reason.”

Mason nods thoughtfully. “Look-” and John is tempted to close his eyes, but he’s gotta make it through the next week so he shouldn’t start now. “It hasn’t been the same without you. I know we don’t always see eye to eye on things and that’s probably a good thing. I’m sorry.”

John is open mouthed in shock. “That Anne speaking through ya?”

Mason scowls.

“No, no, don’t, being the leader fucking sucks. I get it. Don’t have shit for information and luck about to shit on you and everyone depending on you. Y’gotta trust your people, Mason, they’ll stack the luck in your favor if you do. You know me, there’s a reason I’m the antagonist and Weaver is your right hand man. We wouldn’t all be here calling it the end of things if there were any other way.” John shakes his head.

“Didn’t expect literary analysis of the apocalypse before breakfast.” Mason is irritatingly amused by his rant.

“Come down out of your ivory tower and join us peons in the mud. We’ve got amateur theater.”

Mason gestures at the rain, slight smile on his face. “Don’t think I’ve got much choice.”

John laughs. “Help me drag some wood out to get this fire started.”

Mason swings himself to his feet and follows John into the rec center storage room.

It’s still raining, or at least trying to, when they’re done with breakfast. It’s terrible working conditions and even worse sightseeing conditions so they- everyone from every group who is a leader, nearly ten people now, and everyone else who wants to spectate- crowd into the rec center. A table had been set up in the middle of the largest room as a work table; now it is cleared and Wolf’s war map is spread out on it.

The room is crowded, both with people and the supplies brought in last night. There’s some reorganization going on to make space as John lays out their patchwork of annotated local street maps beside Wolf’s atlas type map. Between the two of them, the arrangement clearly shows the extent of the rubble wall, the scooped out areas on either side of it where buildings used to be, and guesses at what kinds of forces the Espheni have camped in there. It’s a stronghold; they’ll be vulnerable to both ground and aerial attacks when they go over the wall, and the subway tunnels are platform deep in dark sludgy water that’s probably full of terrible secrets.

Mason gestures across the patchwork map, drawing a line across the Capitol side of the National Mall. “We cross here and push them into the river.”

Enos looks at him sharply, “I’m sorry, _what_.”

“We make a line right here and fight in that direction.” Mason waves across the map again. Wolf nods in agreement.

“There are at least five thousand skitters in there and while we don’t know if one overlord can control five thousand skitters, one overlord _can_ control the entire National Mall area.” Enos glances over the maps, “We estimate a minimum of twenty overlords, very likely more. There are also mechs and usually two warships, and they’re using the reflecting pool as a dragonfly spawning pool. We have at _most_ 150 fighters.”

Mason seems to be still on his bullshit despite his apology that morning. John smiles toothily. “We cannot do a mass assault and win. The numbers don’t work.”

Mason looks sour at being overwritten. “So what do you propose we do?”

“Distract their forces with small groups while a stealth group uses the Device on the queen.”

“If there are five thousand skitters,” and the way Mason says it makes it sound like he’s questioning their intelligence, “how will the small groups fare any better?”

“We hit them from all sides so they cannot concentrate their forces on any one group and cannot determine our objective. Smaller groups will also be more mobile.” Enos is rapidly pointing at locations as he speaks. “The queen is here, in the Lincoln Memorial, and so is her entourage. There is a concentration of forces here, but the entire area is being used to supply and as a staging ground. And then there’s the warships here and here.”

Watching Enos overwhelm Mason with information is a treat unto itself. John can only wish that he’d had enough information to pull this off himself anytime in the past.

“Fortunately we’re staged really close, so we don’t need to worry about supply chains. Unfortunately that puts us in an all or nothing situation. So we do need to think carefully about casualties- “ Enos continues. “Row, if you would take over?”

“A medic unit,” Wolf suggests as Row shoulders her way forward to the table.

Row shakes her head. “The small group strategy leaves us too far apart for a dedicated medic unit. There’s no rules here; the Espheni won’t respect the red cross and I _won’t_ let my people out there unprotected.”

Mason opens his mouth, “Wolf, don’t you have medics?”

“Yes, but the first year used up our supplies.”

Anne has been watching in silence for a little while. “There is a hospital near here, and Row, do any of your people know plants well enough to make medicine?”

“We’ve already stripped all three hospitals. There wasn’t much left.” Row gestures vaguely, “I’ve got a couple of people who know their plants and we’ve gathered just about everything in a ten mile radius but we can about treat a headache. We don’t have much more than hot water and biting the leather for serious wounds. We don’t even have alcohol.” Row finishes bitterly.

“Better than nothing.” Anne says dryly. “It’s a damn shame about the hospitals.”

Row makes a sound of tired agreement. “I think each combat unit should be responsible for their own injuries. If any one person gets hurt badly enough to need to retreat back over the wall, everyone in the unit goes.”

Everyone except for Mason and Wolf nod, even Weaver agrees, “The whole plan is based on mobility and we don’t have enough firepower to protect anyone who is staying still for very long.”

Anne offers, “If we can run the cars as ambulances we could set up a much more secure treatment center here.”

Row makes an agreeing sound. “I don’t _like_ not having medics on the field, but I think- in terms of minimizing casualties- evacuation is the best bet.”

“Okay.” Wolf says. Mason glances at him before nodding. “Which leaves the warships to deal with.”

“I’d like to see them before we make any plans about it.” Mason says.

It’s about midday now and the rain has given up trying. Unfortunately the sun has driven the humidity way up. They kit up for the long walk anyway; an hour to walk there, an hour to walk around, an hour to walk back. They’re not taking a car because they don’t all fit in one and sacrificing two work vehicles to this isn’t worth it. 

They don’t even get buzzed on the walk there. It’s a much easier walk than it was the first time or even the second time John had visited the wall. The work crews have cleared paths all the way around, marked safe hides and dangerous areas. No use fleeing if you’ll just get caught by a rubble slide instead. They get passed by a few work vehicles and at one point they hear gunfire from a couple blocks away; presumably a work crew versus a few skitters.

Mason wants to go investigate and John would protest because they won’t get there in any kind of time to help, but it will help Mason to see what they’re up against. 

Halfway there, they round a corner and all that’s before them is the leveled rubble in front of the wall, and then the wall. There’s a couple of people standing around on the rubble, rifles slung over their shoulders. There’s at least one dead skitter piled up in a tangle of its own legs somewhat beyond them. The open trunk of one of their cars is visible beyond the edge of a broken building where the pavement begins again. Everyone seems to be fine; the drama is well over.

John offers, “We can go talk to them, or-”

But Mason is staring up at the wall of rubble. They’re all so small compared to it. “I had no idea how big it was.”

“They don’t do anything small.” John says dryly.

Mason snorts. “I feel like we’re about to poke a T-rex with a stick.”

John jokes, “Can’t be any worse than spear hunting boar, right?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve done that.”

“Oh  _hell_ no, I watched a video once.”

“My point stands.”

For all humans are so often compared to rats in their ability to survive disasters, it’s really the feats they’d pulled off when working together that are the marvel. “Humans spear hunted mammoths. I think we can do this.”

Mason snorts. “Optimism is a strange look on you.”

“One of us has to do it.” John gives him a crooked smile.

“Right. Well, shall we?” Mason tips his head at the wall.

They break up into smaller groups; he goes up with Mason and Weaver with Sara and her rifle as their guard. The rest of the group stays behind as the oddest sort of oversight. 

It is a warren inside the walls. 

It was the last time, too, very little has changed since he last saw. Mason is in awe, or maybe shock, and Weaver observing it with a very critical eye. The seethe of skitters going about tasks, the stench of it, the spawning infrastructure. They watch it for a while, nearly spellbound or something as John tries to absorb everything into memory.

“I hate that the ships are in the middle.” Mason says.

There’s two and space for a third. They’re in a group, but the group is centered between the walls- there’s no shorter way to it. There’s a dozen cruisers around it, more or less the same as the one John had taken to the moon. They’ll have to get through those even before they get to the warships. 

“Let’s get Wolf up here.” Weaver suggests, and on that they slither back down. At the next good vantage point, they send Wolf and Anston up with Eric as their guard.

By the time they make it back to camp, someone has got venison roasting on potatoes. John doesn’t want hot food after this hellishly sticky day, he’s dizzy with the humidity but they don’t have refrigeration anymore. Eat it or lose it. So he settles for glutting himself on water and dreaming about what he could do with some salt. God, salt, how his standards have dropped.

He mutters to himself, “this salt contains iodide, a necessary nutrient.”

Sara, unfortunately, hears him. “What?”

“Nutrition’s a bitch.” John shrugs. “How long until this catches up with us?” They’ve been lucky; they haven’t lost anyone to heat stroke or a waterborne illness.

“Surely we’re eating enough berries to not get scurvy?”

John laughs, “yeah, but what does a lack of iodide look like?”

Sara shrugs, “fuck if I know.”

“What the fuck is an electrolyte?” John asks rhetorically. “I wish I knew more or less than I do, sometimes.”

Sara pats his shoulder patronizingly before leaving her hand on him. “Oh, look, here comes trouble. Where’s Weaver, I’m about to win this bet.”

John looks up just in time to see Celeste sink a punch into Hal’s belly, dodge his wild retaliatory swing, and get forcibly marched away from the altercation by Maggie.

“Well,” John says contemplatively, “well then.” Enos’s comment about being outnumbered comes to mind. It’s not true anymore but he’s grinning a little. It’s good to see Hal get what he deserves.

Sara says dryly, “that won’t have any repercussions tomorrow at all, huh.”

“No, of course not.”


	21. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the last day before the big drop

Mason starts off the battle plan rework that morning with, “Okay, so. We’re gonna have to do something about those warships first thing. We _can’t_ let them get off the ground otherwise we’ll lose everything. John, did you learn anything on your moon shot?”

“Yeah, so, hold onto your ass for this one. They’re alive on the inside, like the mechs are.”

“Wait, the  _mechs_ are  _alive_ ?” Everyone is staring at him.

“Uh, yeah, it’s some sort of exoskeleton. I torched a downed one open the first year and- well, at that point it was full of maggots.” He wrinkles his nose. “Absolutely fucking foul. But yeah, everything they make is alive on some level.”

“How are the ships alive?”

John sticks his arm out, shoving his jacket sleeve up. He holds his hand palm up, hand relaxed, and grabs his forearm with his other hand to press the tendons in and move his fingers. “That’s basically what we were doing to fly the beemer. When we got blown up, it bled.”

“Where from?”

“Man, I was  _not_ paying attention to that. I was seein’ stars through the open hull of the ship.”

Mason grunts. “Okay. Since they’re warships, we have to assume that we can’t just walk up and stab them with a knife. Gotta get inside.”

“Fill the control room with napalm,” John offers. “Burn out its nervous system. Getting inside is the hard part.”

Wolf agrees, “Of course. The distraction plan- can we take the warships and the queen at the same time?”

“Enh. The warships will need larger assault groups, there won’t be enough people for the distraction,” Enos interjects. 

Wolf offers, “Double distraction. The attack on the warships is a distraction from the attack on the queen. And the original plan is a distraction from the attack on the warships.”

“Two assaults-”

Enos interjects, “Will the same tactic work twice?”

John rubs the back of his head. “Fuck if I know. They left us alone here for like a week and then ramped up attacks even though if they wanted to, they could just wipe us right off the map without hardly trying. They act like goddamn lemmings half the time.”

They all stare at the map for a while.

“Whoever is going to the warships is gonna have to be damn near superhuman.” Anne purses her lips. “Maggie.”

“Ben.” Sara volunteers.

“No.” Anne snaps.

The silence suddenly gets a lot worse.

“We ask her.” John says. “If she says yes, what’s the plan?”

“Just like we decided yesterday but Maggie gets a guard to help her with the ships.”

“If we ask Maggie, we have to ask Ben.”

Mason insists, “No, he’s too young.”

“He wasn’t too young to die on the moon.” John fires back.

“You can’t change chance, Pope.”

“As I stand here, that’s a lie,” John growls. “Someone go find Maggie.”

It’s only a few minutes of standing around before Anthony returns with Maggie- and Hal tagging along behind her. Enos gives her a quick run through of the plan as it stands currently, and she digs in immediately, ignoring all of Hal’s comments as she goes. “Okay, you want me to lead a tiny assault group into the compound to take out the warships?”

“Yeah.”

“You want me to do this knowing that I can be taken under control? Like, are you really sure about this?” Maggie clarifies again.

Anne says, “Forgive me, but you’re the most likely to actually make it to the warships out of any of us.”

“Your defenses have never been better and they won’t know that you’re even there until you’re at the ships, ideally. And I’ll be going with you,” Sara reassures her.

“Yeah, ideally. I don’t want to  _rely_ on that trick, I’ve never used it in ground combat and this could all go to shit really fast.”

“What trick?” Enos asks politely.

Maggie sighs. “I can function as an overlord for a brief period of time for a small number of dragonflies.”

“Oh, shit. Cool.” John grins. “Wait, fuck, that’ll make you vulnerable to the Device.”

“Yep,” Maggie sighs. “Okay, I want to go in through here, and the other group to go in from this direction, and reinforcements over the wall as soon as we’re noticed. If we’re doing a distraction, let’s get them from every side.”

Mason interjects, “We can’t go in that way.”

“Why?” Maggie says flatly. “There’s decent cover inside, even.”

“There’s monuments there.” Mason says like it’s obvious.

“-and?” John stares at him, uncomprehending.

“They’re important! We’ve already lost so much of our country.”

Maggie looks between them. “The monuments are _cover_. I’m using everything we’ve got.”

John takes her side. “Those aren’t our country. We’ve already lost everything that made this a country. Fuck the monuments. The people alive now who are going into combat are more important than the marble.”

Mason stares at him in shock. “I- they’re hope.”

“The Espheni established concentration camps on our soil, which people are _still in_ as far as we know. These don’t mean dick to them. We have to win this to make hope. Treating some carved rocks as special is not how we win this.” John feels like he’s about to snap. “I just want to be clear about where I stand on this. Real actual human lives are more important than preserving historical symbols.”

Mason makes a distressed sound. “The _ideals_ -”

John growls back, “The ideals don’t mean a goddamn thing if we’re all dead!”

Sara sticks her hand into the middle of the circle around the table and snaps her fingers. “Meeting adjourned until we can act like adults, yeah?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” Enos agrees mildly and the meeting rapidly splinters.

At the door, Hal catches Maggie and Sara stops to linger unobtrusively. John leans on the wall beside her to give her an obvious excuse to be lingering. And, also, to keep an ear on the political fractures.

“Maggie, it’s not safe.” Hal says. “I’m going with you.”

Maggie resettles her M4 strap over her shoulder and John realizes that he hasn’t seen her without the rifle over her shoulder since Norfolk. “No.”

“Come on.” Hal wheedles.

“I need a team that I can trust.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Fuck no. You,” and here she points at him emphatically, poking him in the chest with her force, “will disregard mission objective to protect me. _You_ haven’t been on the ground here for three weeks. _You_ don’t know what I am capable of and have never cared.”

“You killed whatsherface, Marshall, with your brain.” Hal says quietly.

“Should be a point in my favor then, huh,” Maggie says archly. “I am picking my team and you won’t be on it. Maybe you can go protect Ben, or Matt.”

“Why Sara, then? I thought you hated Pope.”

“We’ve discussed it. She’ll put a bullet in my head if I get taken under control.”

Hal growls. “Jesus. You can’t just- we’d get you out.”

“I’m walking into a five thousand strong garrison with four people at my back and another five coming from the other side and I am the best goddamn chance any of you have of keeping this campsite from getting turned into molten rubble. You won’t get me out. You won’t get  _any_ of us out if we get taken.”

“Maggie-”

She slips his hand and walks out. Hal turns back inside, muttering to himself and heading for his father.

“Let’s go, I could use some air.” Once outside, John raises an eyebrow at Sara. “Bullet in the head, huh?”

Sara grimaces. “She asked me for a favor.”

“How long has she been working on that overlord trick?”

“Since the day we got here, pretty much. It should be obvious why we weren’t talking about it.”

“Damn, yeah.” John agrees. “I don’t like you going on that mission.”

“I don’t like me going on this mission either. Fuck. Promise is a promise, though.” Sara groans. “She’s right, though. We can’t be on the same team. I’m not dying in there and neither is Maggie.”

“Damn right you aren’t.” John sighs, “Fuck, I know, okay, I don’t have to like it.”

“I don’t like you going into combat, either.”

“I’m not assigned-”

Sara gives his expression right back to him. “Babe, I’m not stupid.”

John snorts. “No, no you ain’t.”

He sees Weaver sitting on the steps of the rec center. “”Scuse me a minute, I gotta talk to Weaver about whatever bullshit Mason is about to pull on Hal’s behalf.”

They reconvene in the afternoon to finish tuning the plans that they’d already made. It’s fortunate that the general shape of the plans had already been made because tensions are again rising by the time they get to the point of picking who is going on the assault on the queen.

“Before we open this up to general comment, who do we want to go on this mission?” Enos asks, at long last. Everyone is quiet, John foremost not wanting to volunteer someone onto what will almost certainly be a suicide mission. “Believe me, I would volunteer but I am not so good at sprinting through fields of enemy combatants anymore.”

That barely gets even a dry chuckle. Mason looks around at them before saying, “Pope. I want Pope to go.”

Enos quirks an eyebrow at him. “Really.”

John flaps his bad arm, once, insolently. “You know I’d volunteer but you probably want someone who can hold a rifle with both hands.”

“Oh, you won’t die as long as I’m around for you to annoy.”

John barks half a laugh. “Annoying you isn’t my only hobby; I’m a man of many interests.”

“Okay, boys.” Enos breaks in.

In the ensuing pause, Weaver says quietly, “I’m going, and I want Eric and Micah. They’ve gotten the closest and they both have combat experience.”

John isn’t surprised that Weaver has volunteered, and Eric and Micah are solid choices. Enos nods, “I will ask Micah- before we ask for volunteers.”

John makes an agreeing sound, “Yeah, I’ll talk to Eric too. Say, Mason, you should go.”

“Yeah,” Mason says, sounding tired as hell. “Yeah.”

John forces a smile. “As long as I’m alive, you’ll find some way to turn up and piss me off.”

“Right.” Weaver says. “Eric, Micah, and myself. If Tom wants to do the honors, I think that the rest of us will make a decent guard.”

John wants to walk around camp a few times and maybe run what he has to say by Sara but the late afternoon is coming too quickly and the longer he waits, the more insincere and terrible he’ll seem. So when he sees Eric standing around with a group decompressing from working close to the wall, he just has to fling himself into it. “Hey, Eric?”

“Yeah?” Eric turns to look at him, “What’s up?”

John doesn’t really know how to say what’s coming next, but this is what Mason meant when he dared him to be the leader, huh. “I gotta talk to you. Come with me?”

Eric follows him aside, just a little ways to tip the odds of not being overheard in their favor.

Deep breath. “We’re putting together a special group to go kill the queen. Later we will announce the plan and ask for volunteers.”

“And you want me to go.” Eric sounds like he isn’t outright rejecting the idea, at least.

John shakes his head. “Weaver asked for you and Micah because you two have gotten the closest and have combat experience together. The fourth is Mason- either him or Weaver are gonna attack the queen. Ideally, you and Micah are guards.”

“Have you talked to Micah?”

“Enos is talking to him. You should too, before the announcement.” John pauses. “It’s not going to be an easy task. Everyone else will be doing a distraction to draw the skitter guard away from the queen for you, but we cannot guarantee your safety.”

Eric nods solemnly, “I’m going.”

“There will be casualties and you might be among them. This is war like we haven’t seen before.” John nods. “I- I’d hate to lose you.”

Eric is looking over his shoulder, but not in disinterest or rejection. “We’re going. Me’n Micah are the best two for it.”

“Think about it. Talk to him.” John reaches out, and feeling immensely awkward, claps him on the shoulder. “Let us know when we call for volunteers.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you.” John says, feeling how utterly inadequate that is and how saying anything else is gratuitous so he walks away before the feeling becomes contagious or something.

John catches Weaver later after the announcement. It had gone- smoothly, at least. There had been some outcry but keeping the planning in plain view had done its job. Eric and Micah had volunteered in unison, defiant and proud. John’s proud of them in a way, but it’s only increasing his feeling of impending doom. 

“Hey.” He offers.

“Hey,” Weaver responds. John sits beside him, shoulder to shoulder, like they had on the steps all of those weeks ago. They seem to only meet like this now and he wishes that they could bicker over drinks about much pettier bullshit like they did before the long march south.

“You know I’d go.” John says after a while.

“No.” Weaver says slowly, “Someone needs to be here to pick up the pieces. After.”

“Enos.” John suggests.

“You.” Weaver insists. “You were always the one who was running at the future.”

John shakes his head. “Anne.”

“You and Anne.”

“I’ve got Sara,” he jokes weakly.

“You know what I mean.”

“What am I gonna do without you to razz on me for everything?” John puts his arm around Weaver’s shoulders, a gruff hug.

Weaver leans just slightly into it, not even grouching about it. “I’m sure Sara will keep you in line.”

“She’ll do something, that’s for sure.”

Weaver shrugs his arm off, and John lets him. “Listen to her, John, she’s a smart lady.”

“She’s great, isn’t she.” John says softly.

“I gotta get some sleep before tomorrow.” Weaver stands up like he’s pulling himself out of molasses.

“See ya, Dan.” John watches him go.

Mason, Weaver, Eric, And Micah are heading down early in the morning. It will take them most of the cool and the fog to get across the river and into the stand of trees across from the Lincoln Memorial. They’re taking a car- to haul the canoe, and as an ambulance, god forbid, because they will be completely out of contact until they return. If they return. There’s no rescue for them, there’s no manpower for it.

Accordingly, the car is being prepared tonight. The vote had occurred late and by the time they’d all walked over to the power house, the sun had dipped below the horizon. This car is one of their work cars; it’s got a little lift in the suspension and holds its charge the best. John has it half up on the curb so that he can get underneath it to inspect it for any horrible surprises.

The irony that he’s inspecting an electric car with a mug full of burning wood chips for light is not lost on him. He doesn’t _n_ eed to do this. The car has been reliable for over a month now, not a single issue. But if he doesn’t do this, something will go wrong. He can’t allow that.

Superstitions are a hell of a thing.

Sara’s on the porch, Anthony and Hal are on the roof of the house, rifles in hand. Mason is sitting on the curb by the front of the car, two backpacks by his feet and rifle over his shoulder. One is of food and the other is weapons. John can just barely see his boots from where he is under the car.

The silence is killing him. “Mason?”

“Yeah?” Mason is muffled by the amount of car between them.

“Don’t martyr yourself out there.” John’s voice sounds hollow even to himself.

Mason stays quiet for so long that even John can’t justify being under the car anymore, so he works his way out so that he can sit up and crack his shoulders.

“Is that what you think this is about?” Mason says quietly.

John shrugs.

Mason sighs, “It’s about everyone else.”

“Nah.”

“John.”

“Nah, Mason, nah. It’s about you because you’re the one running up on the queen with a fuckin pop bottle full of brain poison. It’ll make you a hero, and that’ll make your life easier.”

Mason flips a hand. “You voted for me.”

“Yeah, I did. And I’m still half a mind to knock you out and do it myself.” John relocates to the curb beside Mason. “But Weaver says it’s better if I stay behind, that- that it’s better if one of us is left after all’s said and done. Can’t say that I envy you.”

“Heh.” Mason tries for levity and fails, “You might come back again.”

“No. Just no,” John shakes his head. “Car’s good, by the way.”

Mason nods, standing up. John moves the car back into the driveway beside the power house, Mason leaves the backpacks in the trunk, and they all head back to the main camp on foot. 

When they get into camp, John leans to Sara to whisper to her, “I’ll just be a moment, I need to to talk to Mason. Go on,” and kisses her cheek.

Hal and Anthony have already split, Mason starting to follow. John calls after him, “Hey, Mason!”

Mason turns to him. “What?”

“I meant it, back there. Don’t martyr yourself out there.”

Mason narrows his eyes, “Do you really think that I’d leave _you_ in charge?”

John scoffs, looking away. “I loved you, I really did.” It comes out rough and made of broken edges.

Mason is staring at him in shock, maybe betrayal.

“Fuck,” John mutters, turning and walking away.

“Pope!” Mason calls after him.

“Nope.” John mumbles, not to be heard, and keeps walking.

“What happened back there?”

“Told Mason that I loved him. Past tense.”

Sara looks at him, somewhere between confusion and shock.

“I didn’t mean to- I just said it.” He shrugs. “I did but not anymore.”

Sara nods, reaching out and pulling him into a hug. “Prouda you.”

“Turned my fucking life around for him,” John shakes his head. “Lemme eat you out and not think about it.”

She laughs, “C’mon.”


	22. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [extended gunfire]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: character death

Everything goes to chaos as soon as they scale the rubble wall. This is different from any other battles that John has ever been involved in, the scale is huge and keeps getting bigger like some sort of fractaline nightmare. They’ve deliberately split up into eight teams. Two of them are small, five people each, fast and stealthy. The other six are fifteen or so each, and all of the other fighters are stationed on the wall as overwatch or back at the camp to ward off retaliation. Everyone has a job; some people are protecting the group, some people are guiding the group, at least one person has eyes on the sky, and a person or two whose sole job is carrying ammunition and reloading everyone else’s magazines.

John is in one of the larger groups as a reloader. He’s got more ammunition on him right now than he’s seen in the entire last year and a half and still somehow the only weapon of his own that he’s carrying is his revolver. He is painfully acutely aware that six shots gets him nowhere in this kind of battle. It’s as useful as a charm bracelet.

The warship parties went over the wall first, one on each side and heading for the middle where the warships are, slipping and sliding down the rubble. The rain has kept the dust down so it’s harder to see where they are but it’ll be hell getting out. They’re sprinting flat out across the open ground, there’s so damn much of it. They make it to the edge of the steel warren around the warships; skitters are noticing and the distraction parties are running in now, pulling the wave of skitters away from the warships by being larger, louder, more dangerous and fuck them but it’s working. It’s terrifying.

He remembers when they didn’t know how to kill skitters, when the first one he’d dropped with his arm in its mouth and his knife buried in the back of its throat was a  _revelation_ . 

They’ve practiced for this. Enos had them practice moving in their groups and all the time in the work/combat parties paying off. Jesus, John is grateful. If it works they only have to make it twenty, thirty minutes before they can retreat back over the wall. If it doesn’t, well, doesn’t much matter then because there’s no way they can fend off a sustained assault from a base this big.

Between magazine reloads, John keeps checking his watch. Time is slurry with the constant hammer of gunfire all around him combined with the tsunami of adrenaline. The assault party should be landed and in the copse of trees by now; they’d coordinated timepieces. This shit is on a schedule. He still can’t quite believe that they’re pulling off an amphibious assault with canoes.

Time stretches; magazine, check, magazine, check. Come on Mason, where the fuck are you?

They’d very specifically not concentrated the attack in any one area; with no clear objective they should be harder to strategize against. As much as the Espheni have any kind of strategy beyond total annihilation, anyway. They’ve risen to the assault like a kicked hornet’s nest.

One of the warships is burning now and it’s a heartwarming sight to see, the dirty curls of smoke like coals eating their way up underneath a fresh log. Sometimes a black hornet falls out of the sky like a bowling ball, dropped by the sharpshooters on the wall. They don’t land dead; their wings still beating weakly at the dirt. There is no mercy killing here. John hopes that the downed hornets are broadcasting pain all over the Espheni telepathy channels and making communication difficult for them.

There’s a moment of clarity- there’s a mech coming right at them and they’ve got napalm for that- but a sightline clears between him and the other warship and he sees something insane in snapshots before the mech fires at their group. Maggie standing on the top of the warship, rifle at her shoulder and shooting every skitter that tries to run up on her right off the curved hull. A second mech, heading right for her. She screams at it, not that he can hear it, shoving herself away in a motion that doesn’t make any sense shoulder strap of her rifle catching it for her and then in the same moment, she’s fallen and sliding off of the ship, the mech fires on the warship, and something bone chilling passes over and through them.

Skitters flatten like wheat before a storm, hundred yard radius around the warship and John feels like someone has not only stepped on his grave but is maybe digging it too in the stunned silence that follows.

“Holy shit.” Someone says, the first clearly audible words in who knows how long.

“Was that it?” It can’t be, the mech is struggling to get up, it had never fired on them and downed like that, it’ll never be easier to kill. 

“ _Get the mech_ . _GET THE MECH._ ”

The napalm is scary stuff. They’d tested the launchers for the canisters and the propellant had expired. Which means that someone has to run up on the mech and prime the canister like a grenade and throw it and run before it detonates. They’ve tested it. It works. It’s terrifying.

Anthony is climbing the carapace like a spider, gym bag full of nightmares at his chest and he shoves one into a notch in the chest plate and  _bolts_ with a flying leap to the ground, stumbling and recovering as he lands. John wants to cheer as it detonates; they can’t shoot the mechs down but the napalm will cook the living part of it in the carapace like an unopened can of beans in a pot of boiling water.

And then skitters start getting back up and everything slams back into motion. He hopes that Maggie’s team got her out of there before the mech strike because his group is turning into an island with a little wall of its own made out of skitter corpses. They’re gonna have to move before they get trapped in here.

And then everything changes just slightly. The Espheni seem to lose focus, almost, the humans are now pushing the assault into disorder instead of a uniform resistance. The only ones still behaving at all normally are the skitters; they’re still rushing but it’s lemming-like just as they were at the Charleston encampment. The hornets are hovering or returning to the dirty water of the Reflecting Pool in some sort of default state that makes them easy to pick off. An overlord has simply keeled over.

Mason must have succeeded.

Thank fuck. That’s their cue to withdraw and get everyone back over the rubble wall. They’re moving like a slime mold through a gap in the carnage when one of the spotters starts yelling. “Look up! Heads up!”

Something- a skitter, one leg off, careens off of a shattered wall and into their group. It’s crazed, operating more on pain than it is intention but it’s lethal anyway, lashing and throwing them as too many people try to fire on it at once. He remember later- it rears back and snaps him across the head with its remaining foreleg and he feels the claws score home across his head. There’s not a goddamn thing he could have done. All he can think in the moment  _I can still see with both eyes I can still see_ but it puts him on his ass, blood pouring out between his fingers and someone hoisting at him,  _come on let’s go get up John we gotta go now-_

He doesn’t know how they made it back over the wall, or back to camp.

Anne pours hot water through his face and hair, it’s hotter than he can stand, scalding. She’s saying, “I need to cut your hair, you need stitches,” and he’s pleading with her that he’ll be fine, just let him-.

And she says, “I’m sorry but you don’t have a choice,” holding his head still while Celeste shaves a chunk of hair off of the side of his head with a straight razor. He ends up zoned out from the pain, staring at the stars embroidered on her jacket and gritting his teeth through the leather of his gun belt.

Celeste passes him back to Anne, who threads her needle with a hair yanked from his head and gets to work. It’s an incomprehensible amount of time later when she puts a boiled bandana in his hand and makes him press it to the wound. “You’re good to go. Keep that pressed to it, and have someone braid your hair back better. Come see me again later to get it rinsed out.”

He says  _okay_ , dully, not fully aware, and relocates himself to a low wall a little ways away.

Sara blanches when she sees him holding the bandanna tight to the side of his head. It’s the only thing that he can feel- they still had anesthetics when he was shot. This is so much worse. He’s so glad to see her.

She’s got a bloody spot all down the side of her leg. He tries to say _go see Anne_ but she ignores him. She says, “Don’t worry, it’s not mine,” and he’d call her a liar but his brain isn’t moving fast enough.

She sits with him and even though he doesn’t- can’t- ask, she lists off the dead and wounded. 8 dead and 6 bodies recovered. 20 odd injuries, not counting him or her or the people who decided that they didn’t need help. It’s a cold feeling; they did their best and the two left behind will be at most bones when they push the next offensive in tomorrow.

They wait and they wait and they wait and by the time she’s done braiding his hair back, Mason and Weaver and Eric and Micah still haven’t returned.

John isn’t really aware of how much time has passed before the car blitzes in through the perimeter. Eric’s driving, Micah is riding shotgun, and after he’s stopped the car in the middle of the yard, Weaver slumped on the floor in the back, the back seats having long since been removed.

No Mason.

The entire camp clusters up around the car, jostling and fearfully quiet. Waiting for someone to say what’s going on.

Eric and Micah are the first ones out and they’re silent, just holding each other and refusing to meet the eyes of anyone in the crowd. Weaver clambers out a moment later, motions stiff; he’s spattered with blood and some of it clearly isn’t his. He doesn’t say anything, just going for Anne the very moment that he sees her. 

They embrace in a long close hug.

Enos limps out of the crowd and group hugs Eric and Micah, shaking them slightly.

The suspense hangs until Weaver separates slightly from Anne, arm still over her shoulders. She’s half supporting him; there’s something wrong with one of his legs. He announces, voice hollow, “Mason didn’t make it.”

That’s freely obvious. John hates it.

The whisper of it travels through the crowd, moving like a dour breeze. There’s not surprise, exactly, but they’d hoped. They’d hope that the success would come without counting further cost.

Weaver refuses, after that, to answer any other questions. He’s not responding to anyone except for Anne, and John would guess that’s only because she’s holding him up and staggering him out and away from the crowd. John quietly asks Anthony to keep an eye on him and Anthony almost protests before nodding solemnly. He was one of theirs; they have to stick together.

Eric tells them what happened. They’d made it across the river and onto land without any problem. There was a guard at the Memorial but the distraction was working and they cut through it pretty easily.

The queen was physically larger than expected: Mason ran through the entourage and tried to climb the queen. She speared him up on a foreleg and lifted him as if to eat him. Mason stabbed her in the neck with the Device, which gave her a seizure or something like it. But she also threw him, and marble is unforgiving.

The waiting, Micah says, was the worst; if they killed the queen too early, the virus might not spread. A wave of skitters came and by the time the virus disoriented them, it was too late to get Mason out. It was them or him, and he was already still and Weaver had gotten hurt from being too close when the queen seized.

It was them or him. They took Weaver and went.

It’s somber.

“What do we do now?” Anne asks, sounding lost. She must have drifted back in while Eric and Micah were debriefing.

“What we said we’d do.” Sara steps out into the dusk and the firelight. “Tonight we gather our people and celebrate our victory and mourn our losses. Tomorrow we finish the job. After that-” she shrugs “-We decide if we want to stay in DC, or move somewhere else while we look to our future.”

John watches her, tongue thick in his mouth. They’re all tired and dirty, her too, but she’s shining in the low firelight. The better of the two of them, her and Anne the better of the four of them.

Enos steps up, pulling Micah under his arm. “After that, we prepare for winter.”

John steps forward too, “Just because we’re here doesn’t mean we have any more say in how this country goes forward than anyone else.” He looks at Enos for the last bit. “We need _everyone_.”

Enos nods, catching his drift.

“We’ve got work to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the first drafts of this and the previous chapters predate the 2020 blm protests. publishing the last chapter during/after blm and this chapter after the election. complicated emotions here today lads.


	23. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> take a run at the future

John wakes up in the foggy deep grey of dawn. His head aches; he can feel his heartbeat in every stitch, each beat like the wave of a rising tide. He’s not going back to sleep.

He kisses Sara’s cheek, pulls his jacket out of their blankets and works it on over his stiff shoulder. Outside of their tent, he steps into his boots but doesn’t zip them before heading out to the patio courtyard where they’ve been keeping the cooking fires.

Very few other people are awake; the night guard, him, and over by the edge on the river side is Anne. He heads over to her.

“Hey.”

There’s a pause before she dully responds, “Hey.”

He sits beside her in silence, looking in the direction of the river even though it’s not visible through the trees.

“Who are we going to lose today?”

He breathes, heartbeats of pain flattening his thoughts, “I’m sorry, Anne.”

“What was that thing you weren’t telling Tom?”

He wasn’t going to tell her for a little longer. She’s had enough loss for one day, no need to make her grieve twice-over. “I was going to tell you after-”

“Just tell me.”

“It has to do with Lexi,” he cautions.

“I know. Weaver isn’t very good at keeping secrets. Not from me, at least.” Anne’s tone is fond, though. They both know how Weaver is and John isn’t particularly surprised.

“She came back like I did. She just walked into camp one day and we decided to keep her for Tom’s sake.”

“What happened?”

“We found the Device and she tried to steal it. I figured that if she wanted to steal it, it must be important so I tried to get it back. She broke my shoulder and we both got scratched by it and I had a small allergic reaction but her throat closed up and-” He trails off.

“Did you bury her?” Anne asks hollowly.

“Of course.”

“Thank you.” She leans her head on his shoulder. He slowly moves his arm to be around her shoulders. “I was wondering why you came back.”

“We found a dead overlord a few days later. Keeled over like it had a heart attack or something, and thought that maybe it and Lexi were connected. Of course we couldn’t confirm that without Cochise and if it was true, it was too much of an opportunity to pass up, especially with everyone already headed up here.”

Anne nods and stays quiet for a long time. “What am I going to do?”

He went to space instead of Tom, and died in his stead. He came back, but Tom didn’t. They’ll find his bones; probably not today, maybe in the spring. It’s a war of attrition now, all of them and the feral skitters against each other and the coming winter.

“Try to make tomorrow better than yesterday.” It’s such a fucking platitude, it makes him feel a little ill.

But the future is all they have.

Anne sniffs. Wipes her face on her sleeve. “It doesn’t feel like we won.”

Anne’s right. “It’s not over yet.”

And when will it? How long will their alliances last? How long until Eric and Micah dream of something other than horror? How long until preparing for winter is routine instead of a mad dash down a string of crisis into the mouth of starvation?

“Just gotta get through today,” she says unevenly.

John hugs her, one armed. “Be over before you know it.”

She laughs weakly. “How’s your head?”

“Fucking hurts.”

“Let me look.”

Anne moves, kneeling up so that she can see. “Doesn’t look bad. I think we should wash it out again just to be sure.”

The unspoken _yet_ hangs in the air. They don’t have anything more than precautions so they gotta take all of them. Behind them, camp is stirring- he can hear the faint crackle of a fire coming up. “Guess we should get started, huh?”

“Yeah.”

They pull each other to their feet and head back to the center of camp.

The grey peace lasts until mid-morning, the indeterminate grey sky time when just about everybody is done eating when a single skitter careens towards the encampment and the guards put it down. The first warning anyone gets is the crack of gunfire and then it’s all over.

Long enough goes by for them to discount it as a stray, the kind of thing that happens when the overlords are gone. But then two more show up; not at the same time but just as clearly in following of each other and the first one. By the time the fifth one shows up, Enos has called them together to reconsider their plan for the day.

They were expecting combat, just not at their perimeter.

The question is what’s drawing them to the camp and nobody has any good ideas because they’re outside overlord range and the skitters aren’t staying within sight of each other and John is about to propose some real bullshit about how they may have another Espheni clone in their midst when Anne says, “Are they following the sound?”

“Of- oh, fuck.” Enos says, “Yeah, that’s probably it.”

Anne is stepping up to the metaphorical table. “So can we lead them away from camp? I would- I don’t really want to pass up a relatively controlled way of killing skitters since that’s the goal today.”

“John-?” Enos asks like he can tell that John’s still upset about not being allowed on today’s combat mission while Sara and her slight limp is. “Do you wanna lead this one?”

It’ll be one hell of a consolation prize if he can swing it. “Right, do we have any canyons around here? Because I’m thinking that if we can get some decent high ground and yank the muffler off of someone’s bike and get like eight people together, we can probably make up some kind of kill box.”

Anston butts in, “I’d rather draw them away from camp. I think there’s a decent canyon here, or maybe here.” She gestures at the map, indicating places to east and north of their position.

Tyler leans in as well. “There's a clear route from here at the Mall to here, and I think this one is blocked off on the northern end.”

“Alright, who wants to scout it?” Anne looks around. Anthony raises his hand. "Get a couple people to go with you."

Babysitting the kill box turns out to be boring as hell almost as soon as they get it set up. The skitters followed the demonic scream of a Ninja with open headers like ants to sugar, right into the trap. Then they don’t need the motorcycle anymore; the racket of gunfire is enough to keep drawing them away from the Mall in a steady stream. The racket also makes his head seethe and burn.

Over the course of the day, working in shifts, they fill the canyon between the two listing concrete wrecks of office buildings with corpses. It is a slaughter on the scale of the initial invasion, with just as little intention of respecting the dead. Retaliation is a bittersweet thing.

“We did it.” Sara says softly, looking at him through the dark. They’re ghosts; he can see her and yet he can’t. The fabric of the tent feels ephemeral, the concept of privacy without the execution.

Anne’s words echo in him, “It doesn’t feel like it.”

In the canyon- he cannot even guess at the number of skitters killed. 400, 500, a thousand. The canyon filled up to the second story windows with bodies and in the afternoon they’d had to fight their way back up the stream of skitters in order to choke it off and protect the camp that night. The assault group killed an unknown number more, and poisoned the Reflecting Pool to end the black hornets.

All told- a couple of injuries and no deaths.

Unlike at the Charleston encampment, they’re not staying here. The dead Espheni stay where they fall, unmoved, unburned.

Tomorrow they will pack up camp and leave.

“It will, eventually.” Sara says, hand on his knee.

He squeezes her hand. “Winter is-”

“Hey. We’ll be fine.” She pauses, “Well, it’ll probably be like rehab. Never really win but eventually you don’t have to fight so hard.”

She carefully finds his face with her hand, cupping his cheek with her palm. “Kiss me.”

He follows her hand as she draws him in. They kiss for a while, aimless and sweet until they’ve curled down and are dozing.

“Hey-” He hesitates.

“Shh.” She offers.

She knows, he thinks as she snuggles back against him, holding his arm over her side. They have time now, all the time in the world.


	24. epilogue in the spring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John thinks about some things one peaceful spring morning.

At long last, the mornings are starting to warm up. The crisp air and clear yellow sunlight that makes the warmth under blankets all the more delicious. And with nowhere to be other than the present, not for a long time now and not for a little while more- today they and a few other are finishing up preparations to head north tomorrow.

They’d survived the winter. A little lean, a little mean, a little cold. But they’d done it. The skitter attacks had faded with the onset of snow, as had the pressure of fear. Now, post invasion, post retaliation, post victory, mornings are slow: there’s no schedule but the one they choose.

John snugs Sara against him, sneaking a hand over her side to cup her crotch, to give her what he gets when they’re spooned together like this. She mumbles and wriggles back against him. He sneaks his fingers further around and she moans softly, letting her legs cross to trap his hand. He pulses his hand against her, and his dick wasn’t hard before but it’s stiff now.

“Ugh,” She groans, “no fair.”

He laughs, sleepy and rough, “Feels nice, don’t it?”

She groans again, but also squirms against him.

“Hey, babe-”

“Shut up.”

He kisses her shoulder, his motions deliberately pressing his erection against her, making him moan too.

“Gimme,” She says, her heat building in his hand as she tilts her hips back for him.

“Yeah?”

“Shush.”

He pushes her pants down under her butt and fondles her ass a bit, letting himself just touch her until she demands again.  _Then_ he pushes his own pants down and lets the bar of of his dick rest against her, skin to skin. He presses them back together again, hand over her pussy, they sigh in unison. She rocks slightly, drawing moans out of both of them.

“Gimme.” She demands again.

He presses his dick between her legs, spreading her labia with his fingers so that he can slide against her.

She moves his hand so that she can rub her clit herself, quickly picking up speed and need. He matches her, thrusts between her legs nearly rolling them onto her belly and sometimes stubbing against her fingers.

He can feel her orgasm from the outside, all through her body. It’s wonderful, he needs so much-

She rolls off of his dick, rolling over and swallowing him down so hot and quickly that he comes almost immediately.

She slides up, letting them rest together, and spits it all into his mouth. “Morning.”

“Mornin’,” He pulls her in for a kiss.

Later, John looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. Living in a house has agreed with him, but his wounds never healed quite right. His shoulder is still stiff and he no longer hopes to regain the full range of motion. His scalp had scarred and his hair never regrew, so now he has a three inch deep notch in his hairline. He can’t tell if it’s badass or a disfigurement, it depends on the day. He keeps his hair braided on that side to make it lay evenly, and he’s gotten pretty good at doing it himself although it’s always nicer to have Sara do it. Every time he ties the braid off, he thanks god that he didn’t lose his eye.

Sara thinks that the braid is cute, but Sara walks with a limp because she’d lied to Anne about how badly she’d been hurt and that nightmarish bruise had turned into something else as they’d walked home, they don’t know what. He carries her up the stairs sometimes, because he can, because she likes it, because he hates to see her haul her dull leg up step by step no matter how well she hides it.

They’d won, and nothing will be the same ever again.

And now, like they’d agreed on the radio, they’re heading north to meet up with everyone else. They’re leaving a full two weeks early; they are not expecting all of their power houses to be operational and it will be a long and grueling slog to get up the coast even if all of the roads are clear, which they won’t be.

They’re going to meet the others; Anne and Weaver, Enos, Anston, Wolf, and their people which choose to come with them. It’s been five months and they’re going to decide if they’re going to make a nation.

John hopes not. Their loose coalition has rules that could be codified to make it easier to add more groups; there’s others out there, they know it. But what they really need, more than a nation, is a way to share information so that they can all survive better every year, every day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I had a wild time creating this monstrosity and while I can already see things that I'd do differently, I'm pretty dang satisfied with my work here. I hope you enjoyed!


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